Yellow Balls in W33

Infrared wavelengths of 3.6, 8.0, and 24.0 microns observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope are mapped into visible colors red, green, and blue in this striking image. The cosmic cloud of gas and dust is W33, a massive starforming complex some 13,000 light-years distant, near the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. So what are all those yellow balls? Citizen scientists of the web-based Milky Way Project found the features they called yellow balls as they scanned many Spitzer images and persistently asked that question of researchers. Now there is an answer. The yellow balls in Spitzer images are identified as an early stage of massive star formation. They appear yellow because they are overlapping regions of red and green, the assigned colors that correspond to dust and organic molecules known as PAHs at Spitzer wavelengths. Yellow balls represent the stage before newborn massive stars clear out cavities in their surrounding gas and dust and appear as green-rimmed bubbles with red centers in the Spitzer image. Of course, the astronomical crowdsourcing success story is only part of the Zooniverse. The Spitzer image spans 0.5 degrees or about 100 light-years at the estimated distance of W33. via NASA http://ift.tt/1LtOTXR

NASA Budget Preview

Keith's note: You can expect to see a NASA budget for $18.5 billion to be announced on Monday. Planetary gets treated well and Europa mission planning gets significant money and a Phase A start. NASA also gets what they...



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NASA Launches Groundbreaking Soil Moisture Mapping Satellite

NASA successfully launched its first Earth satellite designed to collect global observations of the vital soil moisture hidden just beneath our feet. The Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) observatory, a mission with broad applications for science and society, lifted off at 6:22 a.m. PST (9:22 a.m. EST) Saturday from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, on a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket.



January 31, 2015

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SMAP Takes to the Skies

A United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket with the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) observatory onboard is seen in this long exposure photograph as it launches from Space Launch Complex 2, Saturday, Jan. 31, 2015, Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. SMAP is NASA’s first Earth-observing satellite designed to collect global observations of surface soil moisture and its freeze/thaw state. SMAP will provide high resolution global measurements of soil moisture from space. The data will be used to enhance scientists' understanding of the processes that link Earth's water, energy, and carbon cycles. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls) via NASA http://ift.tt/1Abg9qy

Remembering Charles Townes

Mat Kaplan honors the memory of a scientific pioneer.



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SMAP Launched

SMAP Launched (with video) "NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) successfully lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 9:22 a.m. EST Saturday. SMAP is a three-year mission to study and map the Earth's soil moisture, which regulates...



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A Night at Poker Flat

Four NASA suborbital sounding rockets leapt into the night on January 26, from the University of Alaska's Poker Flat Research Range. This time lapse composite image follows all four launches of the small, multi-stage rockets to explore winter's mesmerizing, aurora-filled skies. During the exposures, stars trailed around the North Celestial Pole, high above the horizon at the site 30 miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska. Lidar, beams of pulsed green lasers, also left traces through the scene. Operating successfully, the payloads lofted were two Mesosphere-Lower Thermosphere Turbulence Experiments (M-TeX) and two Mesospheric Inversion-layer Stratified Turbulence (MIST) experiments, creating vapor trails at high altitudes to be tracked by ground-based observations. via NASA http://ift.tt/1LoEhJN

Camera now measuring even fainter Near-Earth Objects

Camera purchased with the support of a 2009 Shoemaker NEO Grant is now on a new telescope providing follow-up measurements for even fainter near-Earth objects.



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Astronauts Speak with University of California Students from Space Station

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering students at the University of California, Davis will have a rare opportunity to speak with Expedition 42 crew members currently aboard the International Space Station (ISS) at 12:45 p.m. EST (9:45 a.m. PST) Thursday, Feb. 5. The 20-minute Earth-to-space call will air live on NASA Television and the agency’s website.



January 30, 2015

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NASA TV Coverage Set for NOAA DSCOVR Launch Feb. 8

The Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) is scheduled to launch at 6:10 p.m. EST Sunday, Feb. 8 from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. A backup launch opportunity is available at 6:07 p.m. on Feb. 9, if needed.



January 30, 2015

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Launch of NASA Soil Moisture Mapping Mission Set for Saturday

NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive mission (SMAP) now is scheduled to launch from Space Launch Complex 2 at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California at 9:20 a.m. EST (6:20 a.m. PST) Saturday, Jan. 31 on a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket. NASA Television coverage of the launch will begin at 7 a.m.



January 30, 2015

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NASA's Invitation-Only Stealth Tweetup is Underway at JSC

Keith's note:If you have been paying attention to NASA's press releases this past week you know that there a series of NASA social media events at all of NASA's field centers next week. NASA does a lot of these...



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Talking to Pluto is hard! Why it takes so long to get data back from New Horizons

As I write this post, New Horizons is nearing the end of a weeklong optical navigation campaign. The last optical navigation images in the weeklong series will be taken tomorrow, but it will likely take two weeks or more for all the data to get to Earth. Two weeks! Why does it take so long?



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Dawn Journal: Closing in on Ceres

Dawn's chief engineer Marc Rayman gives an update on the mission as it gets ever closer to its next target: The dwarf planet Ceres.



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Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel: Lack of Transparency in Commercial Space

Safety panel accuses NASA of a 'lack of transparency' in critical space program, Washington Post "NASA's independent safety panel accused the agency of a "lack of transparency" about its program to hire commercial space companies to fly astronauts to the...



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Meet the New Boss, Very Much NOT The Same As the Old Boss

For those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter, I recently linked to an article that I think is very mportant. It was written by my friend Hank Green, about the reactions to his recent interview with President Obama.

Hank, as you may know, makes amazing YouTube videos about all manners of topics, with the overarching goal of making the world a better place. This isn’t some treacly greeting-card sentiment; Hank (and his brother John, and their team of amazing young people creating videos) honestly and openly want everyone to be better people. Their motto is “Don’t Forget To Be Awesome”. And they mean it.

Hank, along with YouTube creators Bethany Mota and Glozell Green, interviewed the President, asking him questions that were important to their audience. These included the government’s use of drones, Net Neutrality, Boko Haram, and racial tension. These questions were unflinching, unapologetic, and discussed without the manufactured “both sides” baloney so common in mainstream media.

The reaction to this by some of that same media was as predictable as it was maddening: disbelief and derision. This is what inspired Hank to write his article. I strongly urge you to read it.

Hank calls these older news sources “legacy media”, which is an interesting term. He describes how these current news media inherited their positions of popularity, as opposed to earning it; they’re not the same venues they once were. A lot of their inroads into our society, their ability to get their message out, is based on their past when things were very different.

And the trust they rely on now has, in many cases, been squandered if not cynically exploited and outright betrayed. The 24 hour news cycle is a huge factor in this, I think; that is a lot of time to fill, and nonsense loves to occupy that space. But corporate ownership is a huge part of the problem, especially when the owners are dogmatic ideologues with an agenda.

Apropos of that, one of my favorite parts of Hank’s article was his response to a tweet by Rupert Murdoch. The head of NewsCorp (the right-wing company that owns Fox News) tweeted this:

Hank’s response was perfect. Perfect.

As Hank points out in his article, the average age of Fox viewers is not exactly young. Young folks in high school and college don’t get their news from Fox (or CNN or even MSNBC); they’re far more likely to get it from The Daily Show, from links on social media, and on YouTube.

It’s incredibly trite, but it’s true nonetheless: The future is online. A big chunk of the legacy media still haven’t quite figured this out. They just slap their printed or TV content online and call it good, but that’s not the way things work (or, at the least, it's not enough). And they’re starting from the wrong premise anyway. Younger folks don’t want to see five old rich white guys yelling at each other about women’s rights. They want a thoughtful take on it, from people who represent them better.

People like Hank, Mota, Green, and so many others have spent a lot of time being themselves online, and have built a huge capital of trust. That’s why their audience numbers in the many, many millions.

It’s not too late for legacy media. All they have to do is win our trust back. But trust is earned, not given, and earning that trust is hard work, something I don’t see too many in the old school doing much of. Resting on their legacy is how they got to this dying cul-de-sac in the first place^*.

I have no specific solutions, no road map for legacy media to save themselves. This is new territory, and it's being mapped out as it's being discovered. Maybe we just have to wait for the old media to die off... but that’ll take a while. They still have a lot of money, and a maniacal grip on a lot of politicians.

But there’s hope; the President did speak to this new group, and he did reach their younger audience.

What I can hope for is that an entire new generation will reach their adulthood having grown up under the tutelage of this new wave of media, and absorb those principles. All they need to do is don’t forget to be awesome.

I’ll leave you with this: The Presidential interview. It’s really quite good.

^* I’ll note that Slate started as a totally online magazine, which is one of the reasons it’s still going strong, and one of the reasons I was happy to hitch my wagon to them. They understand online culture, and don’t carry the baggage of Old Media.

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Close Encounter with M44

On Monday, January 26, well-tracked asteroid 2004 BL86 made its closest approach, a mere 1.2 million kilometers from our fair planet. That's about 3.1 times the Earth-Moon distance or 4 light-seconds away. Moving quickly through Earth's night sky, it left this streak in a 40 minute long exposure on January 27 made from Piemonte, Italy. The remarkably pretty telescopic field of view includes M44, also known as the Beehive or Praesepe star cluster in Cancer. Of course, its close encounter with M44 is only an apparent one, with the cluster nearly along the same line-of-sight to the near-earth asteroid. The actual distance between star cluster and asteroid is around 600 light-years. Still, the close approach to planet Earth allowed detailed radar imaging from NASA's Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, California and revealed the asteroid to have its own moon. via NASA http://ift.tt/1uDIdf4

Crash Course Astronomy Episode 3: Cycles in the Sky

You live on a whirling ball of rock and metal. As it spins it also revolves around the Sun, and all this is set in a backdrop of thousands of visible but much more distant stars … and on top of that, there are other planets in the solar system moving around as well.

What does all this look like? Why, that’s the very topic of Episode 3 of Crash Course Astronomy: Cycles in the Sky.

When I sat down to write the syllabus (and later the scripts) for this series, the topic of motions in the sky was one I approached with a bit of trepidation. It’s not easy for most folks to picture how all this works; it can be hard to visualize what’s going on, especially when you’re changing your viewpoint from what’s physically happening (the Earth is spinning, the Earth is tilted, the Earth is moving around the Sun) to what you’re seeing from the Earth (stars rise and set, some stars are forever below the horizon from your latitude, stars change their position over the year).

I hope this episode makes this a little bit easier to understand. If it’s still hard to grasp some of this, that’s OK! It’s always hard at first; it was hard for me. I’ve been doing this a long time now though, so I have a lot of experience going outside and seeing how all these celestial gears fit together. It’s actually a fascinating feeling, looking up and knowing that everything is in motion, and it’s all working under the rules of gravity, momentum, geometry … things we can understand and predict. All the parts are working!

And you can be a part of this too. Go outside and look up. And not just tonight, but tomorrow, and the next night, and the next. Keep looking up. Get to know the night sky, its starry denizens, and its motions. It really is an amazing experience.

Wanna watch more Crash Course Astronomy? The playlist is on YouTube.

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UPDATE -- NASA Hosts Media, Social Media for “State of NASA” Events at Agency Centers

NASA centers across the country are opening their doors Monday, Feb. 2 to media and social media for “State of NASA” events, unique opportunities for a behind-the-scenes look at the agency’s work on its journey to Mars.



January 29, 2015

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NASA Invites Media, Social Media to Major Space Launch System Booster Test

Media and social media followers are invited to watch as NASA tests the largest, most powerful booster ever built March 11 at ATK Aerospace System's test facility in Promontory, Utah. The booster will power NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), which will be used to help send humans to deep space destinations including an asteroid and Mars.



January 29, 2015

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NASA TV Coverage Reset for Launch of Newest Earth-Observing Mission

NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive mission (SMAP) launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, now is scheduled for 9:20 a.m. EST (6:20 a.m. PST) Friday, Jan. 30, with a three-minute launch window. The launch of the United Launch Alliance/Delta II rocket was scrubbed Thursday due to a violation of upper-level wind constraints. Launch managers have initiated a 24-hour recycle. The weather forecast for this launch window shows a 90 percent chance of favorable conditions.



January 29, 2015

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How NASA's Budget Request Comes Together: Part 1

It takes a year to make, and is the starting point for all coming debate by Congress. It's the President's Budget Request, and understanding how it comes together is an important part of being an effective space advocate.



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Another Interesting NASA Event You Can't Listen To

Keith's note: NASA JPL PAO issued this media advisory yesterday giving 4 days advanced notice of a media event covering NASA missions to Europa, Ceres, Pluto, and Saturn. But if you want to know what NASA is saying about...



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Valorie Burr

Valorie Burr (NASA GSFC) "Valorie A. Burr, 61, a resident of Odenton, MD, passed away at her home on January 21, 2015."...



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Laser Rocket Aurora!

This is one of the coolest pictures I’ve ever seen. And bonus: It’s science!

Geez, where to start? OK, this is the Poker Flat Research Range in Alaska, where NASA launches what are called sounding rockets. These are not as big as rockets you might be used to, but they’re still hefty enough to get a payload up as high as 300 km.

On Jan. 26, 2015, four such rockets were launched. In this wide-angle composite picture, you can see the fiery trails of the rocket as they headed skyward (I suspect the exposure started late or was interrupted for the launch on the right, since it starts already off the ground).

In each, you can see where the first stage booster cuts out, and the engine glow gets much dimmer. Then, higher up, the second stage ignites, propelling its payload even higher. The first stage booster continues up on a parabolic arc, then begins to fall. If you trace those arcs down, you’ll even see the impact points on the ground! That’s pretty wild.

The weird feathery glow is part of one of the scientific experiments launched. Called MIST, for Mesospheric Inversion-layer Stratified Turbulence, it releases a compound called tri-methyl aluminum (TMA) tracer, which creates white expanding clouds. The shape of the cloud can be used to measure the amount of turbulence in the mesosphere, the layer of atmosphere about the stratosphere. The experiment was done in part to see how various molecules in the air are transported vertically in the upper atmosphere.

On the left you can see a green beam; that’s a powerful laser shot up into the air to measure atmospheric conditions at different altitudes.

Of course, the green glowy stuff everywhere is the aurora. And finally, the streaks in the sky are stars! These were time exposures, so the stars moved during the photographs, circling the north pole of the sky (called the celestial pole). Normally you’d see Polaris, the North Star, right in the center of those arcs, but it’s hidden by one of the TMA clouds.

And this gets even better: Here’s stunning video of the whole thing, too:

I love science, I really do. But sometimes, I have to wonder: How much of that is because people get to do really, really cool stuff like this?

Tip o' the nose cone to Wigi Tozzi for the link to the video.

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Comet Lovejoy in a Winter Sky

Which of these night sky icons can you find in this beautiful and deep exposure of the northern winter sky? Skylights include the stars in Orion's belt, the Orion Nebula, the Pleiades star cluster, the bright stars Betelgeuse and Rigel, the California Nebula, Barnard's Loop, and Comet Lovejoy. The belt stars of Orion are nearly vertical in the central line between the horizon and the image center, with the lowest belt star obscured by the red glowing Flame Nebula. To the belt's left is the red arc of Barnard's Loop followed by the bright orange star Betelgeuse, while to the belt's right is the colorful Orion Nebula followed by the bright blue star Rigel. The blue cluster of bright stars near the top center is the Pleiades, and the red nebula to its left is the California nebula. The bright orange dot above the image center is the star Aldebaran, while the green object with the long tail to its right is Comet C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy). The featured image was taken about two weeks ago near Palau village in Spain. via NASA http://ift.tt/18sBKzc

Commercial Crew Rivalries: Fun to Watch, Everybody Wins

Now that Boeing and SpaceX have won the high-profile privilege of carrying astronauts to the ISS, they must start making public appearances as reluctant equals.



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NASA Hosts Media, Social Media for “State of NASA” Events at Agency Centers

NASA centers across the country are opening their doors Monday, Feb. 2 to media and social media for “State of NASA” events, unique opportunities for a behind-the-scenes look at the agency’s work on its journey to Mars. These events follow the president’s Fiscal Year 2016 budget proposal delivery to Congress.



January 28, 2015

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NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel Releases 2014 Annual Report

The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), an advisory committee that reports to NASA and Congress, has issued its 2014 annual report examining NASA's safety performance over the past year and highlighting accomplishments, issues and concerns to agency and government officials.



January 28, 2015

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Remembrance

NASA Administrator Message: Day of Remembrance - Jan. 28, 2015 "Today we remember and give thanks for the lives and contributions of those who gave all trying to push the boundaries of human achievement. On this solemn occasion, we pause...



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NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) Ready for Jan. 29 Launch

The sun sets behind Space Launch Complex 2 (SLC-2) with the Delta II rocket and the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) observatory protected by the service structure on Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2015, at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. SMAP is NASA’s first Earth-observing satellite designed to collect global observations of surface soil moisture and its freeze/thaw state. SMAP will provide high resolution global measurements of soil moisture from space. The data will be used to enhance scientists' understanding of the processes that link Earth's water, energy, and carbon cycles. Image Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls via NASA http://ift.tt/1zyp1a3

Our Galaxys Magnetic Field from Planck

What does the magnetic field of our Galaxy look like? It has long been known that a modest magnetic field pervades our Milky Way Galaxy because it is seen to align small dust grains that scatter background light. Only recently, however, has the Sun-orbiting Planck satellite made a high-resolution map of this field. Color coded, the 30-degree wide map confirms, among other things, that the Galaxy's interstellar magnetism is strongest in the central disk. The revolution of charged gas around the Galactic center creates this magnetism, and it is hypothesized that viewed from the top, the Milky Way's magnetic field would appear as a spiral swirling out from the center. What caused many of the details in this and similar Planck maps -- and how magnetism in general affected our Galaxy's evolution -- will likely remain topics of research for years to come. via NASA http://ift.tt/1uVSucf

Ceres: Just a little bit closer (and officially better than Hubble)

Last week's Dawn images of Ceres were just slightly less detailed than Hubble's best. This week's are just slightly better.



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New Falcon Heavy Animation

SpaceX Releases New Animation of Falcon Heavy and Booster Recovery, SpaceRef Business "SpaceX has released a new animation depicting the launch of a Falcon Heavy from famed Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) with the controlled recovery of both boosters and the...



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A second ringed centaur? Centaurs with rings could be common

Chiron, which is both a centaur and a comet, may also have rings.



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A View of the 2015 Blizzard

NASA: Night Time View of the Blizzard of 2015, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center "A combination of the day-night band and high resolution infrared imagery from the Suomi NPP satellite shows the historic blizzard near peak intensity as it moves...



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Astronomers Find Ancient Earth-Sized Planets in Our Galactic Backyard

Astronomers have announced what may be the most interesting exoplanet discovery yet made: five planets, all smaller than Earth, orbiting a very ancient star. And I do mean ancient: Its age is estimated to be more than 11 billion years old, far older than the Sun. These are old, old planets!

There’s a lot going on here, as far as the science goes. Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up. Here are the bullet points:

• The planets were found using the Kepler space telescope, which uses the transit method: If a star has planets, and we see those orbits edge-on, the planets pass in front of their star as seen from Earth. This blocks a bit of the light, and we can measure that. The amount of light blocked (compared with known properties of the star like its size) tells us how big the planet is. The length of time it takes the planet to transit the star also gives us its orbital period, orbital size, and an estimate of its temperature.
  


• The star is called Kepler-444. It’s a bit cooler, more orange, and smaller than the Sun (a K0 dwarf, if you want the details), and is about 117 light-years from Earth. That’s relatively close! Amazingly, it’s actually a triple-star system: There’s a pair of cool red M dwarfs orbiting each other, and the pair in turn orbits the K star. The binary is about 10 billion kilometers from the K star, about twice the distance Neptune is from the Sun.
  


• The five planets orbit the primary K star, and are called Kepler-444b up to Kepler-444f. All five are smaller than Earth, and get bigger in order with their distance from the star: Kepler-444b has a diameter of 0.403 Earth, Kepler-444c is 0.497 Earth, d is 0.530, e is 0.546, and f is the biggest at 0.741 our home planet’s size.
  


• The planets are not in any way Earthlike! The system is very compact; all five planets are quite close to their parent star—even the most distant one, planet f, is closer to its star than Mercury is to the Sun—and therefore pretty hot. They all orbit the star in fewer than 10 days. They’re pretty well cooked.
  


• The system is very old. This was determined using a method called astroseismology, a bit like using earthquakes to observe the Earth’s interior. In this case, the surface of the star vibrates, like standing waves in a bathtub or the way a drumhead vibrates. The character of these waves depends on a lot of the physical properties of the star: its density, mass, surface gravity, size, and age. Very careful observations taken over many weeks were used to get the astroseismological results, and the age was found to be about 11.2 billion years, give or take a billion years. (I’ll note that in part this work was funded through the Pale Blue Dot project, which lets people adopt a star for a small fee that goes toward astroseismology research. Previously, the smallest exoplanet found used research funded through this group, too! And someone named Brian Finley had adopted Kepler-444, so congrats to him, too.)
  


• Assuming the planets formed along with the star—a reasonable assumption—these planets have been around a long, long time. The Universe itself is 13.8 billion years old, and the Milky Way galaxy somewhat younger. These stars and planets formed when the Universe itself was young. Put it this way: When the Sun and Earth formed, these planets were already older than the Sun and Earth are now.

So what does all this mean?

Quite a bit, actually. For one, until now we weren’t sure just how old planets could be. We’ve found some Earth-sized planets older than us, but none this old.

Initially, the Universe was almost all hydrogen and helium, with the heavier stuff coming later. The iron and nickel in the Earth, for example, were formed in supernovae, massive stars that exploded billions of years ago. As the Universe ages, it gets more and more of these elements as more of these big stars explode.

When Kepler-444 formed, there were relatively fewer of these heavy elements, and spectra of the star confirm a paucity of elements like iron. We’ve discovered enough exoplanets now that we see an interesting relationship between heavy elements and planets: Gas giants (like Jupiter and Saturn) tend to form around stars that have more heavy elements; these elements aid in the formation of larger planets. But when you look at smaller, more Earth-sized planets, that relationship goes away. Smaller planets form around stars that have lots of heavy elements, and they also form around stars that have relatively few.

The Kepler-444 system supports this. A gas giant planet would’ve been seen, so it looks like these five planets are all it has (or the biggest it has), and each is small and presumably rocky.

But what of life?

Let me remind you, these planets are flippin’ hot. The coolest most likely has a surface temperature way above the boiling point of water. I wouldn’t think there could be life there.

But don’t be so specific. Take a step back and realize that what this means is that Earth-sized planets could form around Sunlike stars even 11 billion years ago! That may have profound implications for life.

You may have heard of the Fermi paradox: If life is easy to get started on planets, then where are the aliens? We do know that life formed on Earth not too long after the planet’s crust had cooled enough to support it. Let’s say it takes 4 billion years for those protozoa to evolve and build spaceships. It turns out that, even with the vast distances between stars and limiting your ships to far less than the speed of light, you can colonize the entire galaxy in just a few million years. That’s far less than the age of the galaxy.

Perhaps you see the problem. If planets like Earth formed 11 billion years ago, and happened to form at the right distance for more clement conditions on the surface, life could have arisen long enough ago and started building spaceships long before the Earth even formed! They’d have planted their flags on every Earth-sized habitable planet in the Milky Way by now.

Where are they?

We don’t know. There are two many “maybes.” Maybe Earth is special in some way that made life easier to form here. Maybe you need iron and nickel to build spaceships (but even then there are planets a billion or two years older than us that would’ve had plenty of such elements). Maybe evolution doesn’t always work its way to intelligence. Maybe every civilization advanced enough to manipulate its environment did so to its own detriment (cough cough). Maybe they blew themselves up. Maybe they’re out there but so advanced we don’t even recognize them.

Maybe we’re just the first.

That’s always been an idea in my back pocket to explain the Fermi paradox. Someone has to be the first. But that’s a bit tougher to swallow when you see rocky planets that are more than twice as old as our own home planet. Eleven billion years is a long time.

Clearly, we just don’t have all the information yet. We’re just getting started here! We’ve discovered thousands of planets orbiting other stars, but there are probably billions of them out there. Billions! We have a lot more data to collect, a lot more information to analyze, and a lot more thinking to do before we can solve this particular mystery.

But we’re working on it. Kepler-444 and its five, small, melted, ancient worlds are just one small piece of a puzzle that is vast and deep. And they’re a good start.

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Sounding Rockets Launch Into an Aurora

The interaction of solar winds and Earth’s atmosphere produces northern lights, or auroras, that dance across the night sky and mesmerize the casual observer. However, to scientists this interaction is more than a light display. It produces many questions about the role it plays in Earth’s meteorological processes and the impact on the planet’s atmosphere. To help answer some of these questions, NASA suborbital sounding rockets carrying university-developed experiments -- the Mesosphere-Lower Thermosphere Turbulence Experiment (M-TeX) and Mesospheric Inversion-layer Stratified Turbulence (MIST) -- were launched into auroras from the Poker Flat Research Range in Alaska. The experiments explore the Earth’s atmosphere’s response to auroral, radiation belt and solar energetic particles and associated effects on nitric oxide and ozone. This composite shot of all four sounding rockets for the M-TeX and MIST experiments is made up of 30 second exposures. The rocket salvo began at 4:13 a.m. EST, Jan. 26, 2015. A fifth rocket carrying the Auroral Spatial Structures Probe remains ready on the launch pad. The launch window for this experiment runs through Jan. 27. Image Credit: NASA/Jamie Adkins > More: M-TeX and MIST Experiments Launched from Alaska via NASA http://ift.tt/1yL9zFf

NASA’s Dawn Spacecraft Captures Best-Ever View of Dwarf Planet

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has returned the sharpest images ever seen of the dwarf planet Ceres. The images were taken 147,000 miles (237,000 kilometers) from Ceres on Jan. 25, and represent a new milestone for a spacecraft that soon will become the first human-made probe to visit a dwarf planet.



January 27, 2015

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Rosetta Catches a Comet’s Snowflakes on Its Tongue

I’ve seen a lot of stuff when it comes to space science and astronomy, and sure, I’m easily excited about it all … but still, it takes a lot to get me to boggle at something.

So this is me, boggling: This photo below shows grains of comet dust caught on the fly by the Rosetta spacecraft!

Yeah. That is very, very cool.

To be more accurate, they’re the remains of comet dust caught on the fly by the Rosetta spacecraft. OK, let me explain.

Comets are essentially dust, gravel, and rocks packed together by various types of ice. Generally speaking, we’re talking water, carbon dioxide, ammonia, carbon monoxide, and other things that are usually gaseous on Earth, but which are frozen in the depths of space.

Lots of comets orbit the Sun on long, elliptical paths, taking them out into the black, then back in closer to the Sun. As they near the Sun, the ice turns into a gas and blows off, and the other junk making up the comet are blown into space as well.

The Rosetta spacecraft is currently following along a comet, called 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. It orbits the Sun once every 6.5 years, going out as far as Jupiter’s orbit (it’s called a Jupiter-family comet, in fact, a member of many comets with similar orbits), dropping down to just outside Earth’s orbit. As I write this, the comet is about 370 million kilometers from the Sun, a bit more than twice Earth’s distance, and still outside the orbit of Mars.

Still, that’s close enough that it’s already becoming active, and we see streams of gas flowing out of it. That means dust particles are coming off too. The thing is, “dust” is a somewhat generic term for tiny flakes of stuff that can have wildly different compositions. Rosetta is in the unique position to find out what 67/P’s dust is made of. So engineers and scientists gave it a shot.

That shot is COSIMA, the Cometary Secondary Ion Mass Analyser. Have you ever been in a snowfall and caught snowflakes on your tongue? That’s COSIMA, except it has a plate exposed to space instead of a tongue, and instead of snowflakes it’s catching, well, comet snowflakes.

When 67/P was still more than 450 million km from the Sun, and just 30 km from the comet, Rosetta caught several flakes of material from the comet. They impacted the plate at speeds of just 1–10 meters per second, roughly bicycling speed. The photo above shows two such specimens (the scale bars represent 500 and 300 microns, where a human hair is roughly 100 microns wide).

When they hit the plate they fragmented. If there had been lots of ice in them, they would have been held together better and wouldn’t have shattered, so right away this tells us the flakes were dry (not like Earth snowflakes at all). They also have a high sodium content, which matches lots of other interplanetary dust particles, particularly meteoroids that burn up in our atmosphere during meteor showers. We know those come from comets, so that checks out! This means we’ve actually found a sample of the parent material of meteor showers. Cool.

But what’s also interesting is what this means for the surface of the comet. These particles were emitted when the comet “turned on” again, getting close enough to the Sun to become active. Scientists think these grains were actually left over from the last time 67/P came ‘round the Sun. As the comet began to head away from the Sun, the flow of gas outward weakened, and wasn’t strong enough to lift dust away. That material then sat on the surface, and was lifted off as the outflow became strong once again a few months ago.

That outer mantle of older dust will be shed, and then more stuff deeper down will start to get flung away. When this happens the dust content may change, possibly showing us other types of material as well. Rosetta will be around for that; it will follow the comet for many more months as it gets to its closest point to the Sun (called perihelion). The comet should become more active, and we’ll get to investigate what lies beneath.

That to me is incredibly exciting. We know a lot about comets, but the devil’s in the details, and every comet is different. Heck, even a single comet changes a lot over the course of a single orbit, so by monitoring 67/P for several months, we’ll learn a lot about these weird beasts. And that’s the whole point.

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The Milky Way over the Seven Strong Men Rock Formations

You may have heard of the Seven Sisters in the sky, but have you heard about the Seven Strong Men on the ground? Located just west of the Ural Mountains, the unusual Manpupuner rock formations are one of the Seven Wonders of Russia. How these ancient 40-meter high pillars formed is yet unknown. The persistent photographer of this featured image battled rough terrain and uncooperative weather to capture these rugged stone towers in winter at night, being finally successful in February of last year. Utilizing the camera's time delay feature, the photographer holds a flashlight in the foreground near one of the snow-covered pillars. High above, millions of stars shine down, while the band of our Milky Way Galaxy crosses diagonally down from the upper left. via NASA http://ift.tt/1CWiaUQ

Denise Stewart

Keith's note: Denise J. Stewart has passed away. She worked at NASA Headquarters for a number of years. Details to follow shortly....



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NASA Observes Day of Remembrance

NASA will pay will tribute to the crews of Apollo 1 and space shuttles Challenger and Columbia, as well as other NASA colleagues, during the agency's annual Day of Remembrance Wednesday, Jan. 28.



January 26, 2015

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First Commercial Crew Test Flights in 2017

NASA News Conference: Update on the Commercial Crew Program, SpaceRef Business "NASA, Boeing and SpaceX will held a news briefing on NASA Television at the agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston on Jan. 26, to highlight key development activities, test...



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At last! A slew of OSIRIS images shows fascinating landscapes on Rosetta's comet

The first results of the Rosetta mission are out in Science magazine. The publication of these papers means that the OSIRIS camera team has finally released a large quantity of closeup images of comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, taken in August and September of last year. I explain most of them, with help from my notes from December's American Geophysical Union meeting.



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Negative Progress Towards Putting Humans on Mars

Bolden "people are always saying we're 20 years from Mars. I think we're about to go under that"— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) January 26, 2015 Report of the Space Task Group 1969 "NASA [can] carry out a successful program to...



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Rocky Mountain National Park Viewed From the International Space Station

Marking the 100th anniversary of the Rocky Mountain National Park on Jan. 26, 2015, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry Virts posted this photograph, taken from the International Space Station, to Twitter. Virts wrote, "Majestic peaks and trails! Happy 100th anniversary @RockyNPS So much beauty to behold in our @NatlParkService." Image Credit: NASA/Terry Virts via NASA http://ift.tt/1JtMz0Y

It's Official: LightSail Test Flight Scheduled for May 2015

This May, the first of The Planetary Society's two member-funded LightSail spacecraft is slated to hitch a ride to space for a test flight aboard an Atlas V rocket.



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A Twisted Solar Eruptive Prominence

Ten Earths could easily fit in the "claw" of this seemingly solar monster. The monster, actually a huge eruptive prominence, is seen moving out from our Sun in this condensed half-hour time-lapse sequence. This large prominence, though, is significant not only for its size, but its shape. The twisted figure eight shape indicates that a complex magnetic field threads through the emerging solar particles. Differential rotation of gas just inside the surface of the Sun might help account for the surface explosion. The five frame sequence was taken in early 2000 by the Sun-orbiting SOHO satellite. Although large prominences and energetic Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are relatively rare, they are again occurring more frequently now that we are near the Solar Maximum, a time of peak sunspot and solar activity in the eleven-year solar cycle. via NASA http://ift.tt/1JE3Nam

Everyone Wins at Google Lunar X Prize

Team Indus wins competition to land robot on moon, bags Google Lunar Xprize of $1 million, The Economic Times "Bengaluru headquartered space startup Team Indus has won a $1 million prize for completing an intermediate milestone as it competed with...



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Light from Cygnus A

Celebrating astronomy in this International Year of Light, the detailed image reveals spectacular active galaxy Cygnus A in light across the electromagnetic spectrum. Incorporating X-ray data (blue) from the orbiting Chandra Observatory, Cygnus A is seen to be a prodigious source of high energy x-rays. But it is actually more famous at the low energy end of the electromagnetic spectrum. One of the brightest celestial sources visible to radio telescopes, at 600 million light-years distant Cygnus A is the closest powerful radio galaxy. Radio emission (red) extends to either side along the same axis for nearly 300,000 light-years powered by jets of relativistic particles emanating from the galaxy's central supermassive black hole. Hot spots likely mark the ends of the jets impacting surrounding cool, dense material. Confined to yellow hues, optical wavelength data of the galaxy from Hubble and the surrounding field in the Digital Sky Survey complete a remarkable multiwavelength view. via NASA http://ift.tt/1CMqypR

Interior View

Some prefer windows, and these are the best available on board the International Space Station. Taken on January 4, this snapshot from inside the station's large, seven-window Cupola module also shows off a workstation for controlling Canadarm2. Used to grapple visiting cargo vehicles and assist astronauts during spacewalks, the robotic arm is just outside the window at the right. The Cupola itself is attached to the Earth-facing or nadir port of the station's Tranquility module, offering dynamic panoramas of our fair planet. Seen from the station's 90 minute long, 400 kilometer high orbit, Earth's bright limb is in view above center. via NASA http://ift.tt/1JqrMcN

Addressing some common questions about Comet Lovejoy

Lowell Observatory's Matthew Knight addresses several points of confusion that have repeatedly come up in the coverage of Comet Lovejoy.



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USAF Blinks and SpaceX Wins EELV Concessions

United States and SpaceX Agree to Settlement, SpaceX "The Air Force and SpaceX have reached agreement on a path forward for the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program that improves the competitive landscape and achieves mission assurance for national security...



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Launch to Lovejoy

Blasting skyward an Atlas V rocket carrying a U.S. Navy satellite pierces a cloud bank in this starry night scene captured on January 20. On its way to orbit from Space Launch Complex 41, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, planet Earth, the rocket streaks past brightest star Sirius, as seen from a dark beach at Canaveral National Seashore. Above the alpha star of Canis Major, Orion the Hunter strikes a pose familiar to northern winter skygazers. Above Orion is the V-shaped Hyades star cluster, head of Taurus the Bull, and farther still above Taurus it's easy to spot the compact Pleiades star cluster. Of course near the top of the frame you'll find the greenish coma and long tail of Comet Lovejoy, astronomical darling of these January nights. via NASA http://ift.tt/1ChS00P

Field Report from Mars: Sol 3902 - January 15, 2015

Larry Crumpler gives an update on the status of Opportunity's traverse toward Marathon Valley.



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Mike Gazarik Is Leaving NASA

Ball Aerospace Names Michael Gazarik as Technology Director "Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. has hired Michael Gazarik as Director for its Office of Technology on the Boulder campus effective March 2. Dr. Gazarik will lead the alignment of Ball's technology...



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UPDATE - NASA, Boeing, SpaceX Discuss Plan for Launching American Astronauts from the U.S. in 2017

(Updates how media can participate via phone) -- NASA, Boeing and SpaceX will hold a news briefing on NASA Television at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston at noon EST (11 a.m. CST) Monday, Jan. 26, to highlight key development activities, test plans and objectives for achieving certification of two American crew transportation systems.



January 22, 2015

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MoonEx To Us SLC-36

Cape Canaveral SLC-36 Is Central to Moon Express' Commercial Efforts to Reach the Moon "Moon Express and Space Florida have signed an agreement that will lead to Moon Express spacecraft development and flight test operations at SLC-36 starting early this...



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Fountains of Water Vapor and Ice

Deepak Dhingra shares some of the latest research on Enceladus' geysers presented at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in San Francisco last month.



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Greenland's Leidy Glacier

Located in the northwest corner of Greenland, Leidy Glacier is fed by ice from the Academy Glacier (upstream and inland). As Leidy approaches the sea, it is diverted around the tip of an island that separates the Olriks Fjord to the south and Academy Cove to the north. The resulting crisscross pattern is simply the result of ice flowing along the path of least resistance. This view of the region pictured above was acquired August 7, 2012, by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on NASA's Terra satellite. In April 2012, the feature caught the attention of a NASA pilot, who snapped this picture from the cockpit of a high-flying ER-2 aircraft during a research flight over the Greenland ice cap. More information. Image Credit: NASA/Terra via NASA http://ift.tt/1xDQdxZ

The Complex Ion Tail of Comet Lovejoy

What causes the structure in Comet Lovejoy's tail? Comet C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy), which is currently at naked-eye brightness and near its brightest, has been showing an exquisitely detailed ion tail. As the name implies, the ion tail is made of ionized gas -- gas energized by ultraviolet light from the Sun and pushed outward by the solar wind. The solar wind is quite structured and sculpted by the Sun's complex and ever changing magnetic field. The effect of the variable solar wind combined with different gas jets venting from the comet's nucleus accounts for the tail's complex structure. Following the wind, structure in Comet Lovejoy's tail can be seen to move outward from the Sun even alter its wavy appearance over time. The blue color of the ion tail is dominated by recombining carbon monoxide molecules, while the green color of the coma surrounding the head of the comet is created mostly by a slight amount of recombining diatomic carbon molecules. The featured three-panel mosaic image was taken nine days ago from the IRIDA Observatory in Bulgaria. Comet Lovejoy made it closest pass to the Earth two weeks ago and will be at its closest to the Sun in about ten days. After that, the comet will fade as it heads back into the outer Solar System, to return only in about 8,000 years. via NASA http://ift.tt/1xwpV0r

Curiosity update, sols 814-863: Pahrump Hills Walkabout, part 2

Curiosity has spent the last two months completing a second circuit of the Pahrump Hills field site, gathering APXS and MAHLI data. The work has been hampered by the loss of the ChemCam focusing laser, but the team is developing a workaround. Over the holidays, the rover downlinked many Gigabits of image data. The rover is now preparing for a drilling campaign.



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The President's 2016 Budget Is Coming

The 2016 budget cycle for NASA kicks off on Feb 2nd, when the White House releases the President's Budget Request. Here's what to look for.



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Milky Way Moonset

Michael Shainblum is a photographer whose favorite target is the Milky Way (though he took one of the most amazing photos of 2014, lightning hitting the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world).

He sent me a note recently that he caught an unusual scene in Big Sur, California, and, well, take a look:

How cool is that? The Milky Way is almost exactly vertical, plunging down into the Pfeiffer Beach Keyhole Rock, a natural arch carved by erosion. But what’s that glow in the hole? That’s the crescent Moon, setting into the horizon but blocked by the rock itself. The Moon’s path across the sky against the background stars passes fairly close to the center of our spiral galaxy, which we see edge-on because we’re inside it.

This shot is a mosaic of five panels, going from nearly to the zenith down to the rocks at the foot of the tripod supporting the camera. I suspect the subtle illumination of the arch is from the rocks, water, and beach that were lit by the Moon; their back-reflection would then light up the side of the arch facing the camera.

I’ve seen a lot of photos of the Milky Way on the sky, so sometimes you really need to pick your foreground—and the timing—just right to get a photo that really stands out.

You can see more of Shainbum's work on his Facebook page, too.

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Asteroid Abduction

The Space Program - A Modest Proposal, Paul Spudis "I'm at a loss to explain why one aspect of the ARM mission hasn't been discussed in the media: seeing that advocates of the ARM think nothing about re-arranging the architecture...



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Two New Planets in the Solar System? Not So Fast, Folks.

A team of astronomers made something of a news splash late last week when they announced they have indirect evidence that there could be one or more massive planets orbiting in the solar system well beyond Neptune.

I read their journal paper, and their argument is certainly interesting (I’ll explain it in a sec). But let me be clear here: Their evidence of any possible planets out past Neptune is indirect (they don’t have photos or anything like that), it’s based on a small number of objects, and we do have evidence that there aren’t really big (like gas giant–sized) planets past Neptune. And it pains me to even have to bring this up, but of course this has nothing to do with Nibiru crackpottery, either.

Bottom line: To me, this is an interesting and potentially promising line of research, but right now it is quite inconclusive about the existence of planet-sized bodies past Neptune.

How this works isn’t that hard to understand in principle. (Note: After writing this but before posting it, I found that the AstroBites blog also discusses this topic, with more technical info.) In our solar system we have the Sun at the center, and it pretty much runs everything. It has 98 percent of the mass of the solar system, so its gravity is in charge of how everything else moves. BUT, there are also planets that have gravity as well. Their gravity is weak compared with the Sun’s but is strong enough that, given time, the planets can affect the orbits of other objects.

Out past Neptune is a region occupied by objects that are similar to asteroids but made of ice instead of metal and rock (making them more like comets, really). There are various names for them, but in general they’re called trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs. Some are on circular orbits, some more elliptical, some have orbits tipped to the plane of the solar system, some don’t.

A handful, about a dozen discovered so far, have really weird orbits. They are highly elongated, and tipped significantly to the plane of the solar system. The authors of the study call them Extreme TNOs.

Their orbits are difficult to explain from what we know about the solar system now. However, the authors note that there is a comet called 96/P Machholz 1 that also has an odd orbit. It goes around the Sun backward (retrograde) relative to the planets, and the shape and orientation of its orbit change over time. This is due to the influence of Jupiter; the comet’s orbit takes it out as far from the Sun as Jupiter’s orbit, so the huge planet pokes and prods the comet over time. This changes the comet’s orbit, making it undergo all sorts of peculiar behavior.

The authors then speculate that the weird TNOs may be explainable in a similar way. The TNOs fall into four groups according to distance, implying a series of planets at distances ranging from 40 to 150 billion kilometers from the Sun. (For comparison, Neptune is about 4.5 billion km out.) They don’t give specifics about the possible masses these planets would need, except to say they would need “at least several Earth masses” to affect the TNOs.

Again, the evidence they present is interesting, maybe even compelling, but it by no means is proof. They only look at the orbital characteristics of about a dozen extreme TNOs, and it’s hard to extrapolate safely from that. It seems clear something odd is going on, but the mechanism behind it isn’t clear. Planets? Maybe. But it could be something else.

I’ll note that a similar study was done with long period comets, which also found weird orbital characteristics that could be explained by a planet or planets past Neptune affecting their orbits. Unfortunately, this too relied on small number statistics and is interesting but not conclusive.

If these planets exist they can’t be too much bigger than Earth. Otherwise they’d have been seen by now; the NASA infrared survey observatory WISE has shown that no more Jupiter- or Saturn-sized planets can exist in our solar system, even way far out.

Personally, I’d love to have direct evidence of such planets. When I worked with Hubble, I spent some time trying to figure out ways of finding such planets! There’s no real theoretical reason they don’t exist, and we see evidence of planets orbiting other stars at great distances. So why not?

In the end, this research is perhaps motivation to keep looking. Even big planets would be terribly faint and difficult to detect at 150 billion km, so it may be quite a while before we have a confidently complete survey of the solar system. And even if they don’t exist, I’m glad people are still thinking about things like this. It’s best in science not to get too complacent with the “current understanding.” Nature is tricky and a lot more clever than we are.

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Google and Fidelity Invest $1 Billion in SpaceX

It's Early Days in 2015 But SpaceX is Starting at Light Speed with a Satellite Constellation and Possible Google Investment [Updated], SpaceRef Business Marc's note: Updating my story from yesterday, SpaceX this evening issued the following statement. "Space Exploration Technologies...



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Good Thing We Waited 14 Years to Launch Goresat

Al Gore's dream spacecraft gears up for launch, Nature "For Jay Herman, an atmospheric scientist at Goddard and EPIC instrument scientist, the delay has a silver lining: the refurbishment revealed a manufacturing defect in EPIC that would have let in...



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Antares Rocket Rolls Out at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility

An Orbital Sciences Corporation Antares rocket is seen as it is rolled out to Launch Pad-0A at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, Sunday, Jan. 5, 2014 in advance of a planned Wednesday, Jan. 8th, 1:32 p.m. EST launch, Wallops Island, Va. The Antares will launch a Cygnus spacecraft on a cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station. The Orbital-1 mission is Orbital Sciences' first contracted cargo delivery flight to the space station for NASA. Among the cargo aboard Cygnus set to launch to the space station are science experiments, crew provisions, spare parts and other hardware. Image Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls via NASA http://ift.tt/1cGLobp

International Space Station Awaits Orbital-1 Resupply Mission

The sun shines through a truss-based radiator panel and a primary solar array panel on the Earth-orbiting International Space Station (ISS) in this photograph taken by an Expedition 38 crew member on Jan. 2, 2014. The crew on the ISS is awaiting the first commercial resupply mission to the ISS by Orbital Sciences, Orbital-1. Orbital Sciences will proceed with a 1:07 p.m. EST launch attempt of the Orbital-1 cargo resupply mission to the ISS today, Thursday, Jan. 9. Meanwhile, as more than 30 heads of space agencies from around the world gather in Washington Jan. 9-10 for an unprecedented summit on the future of space exploration, the Obama Administration has approved an extension of the ISS until at least 2024. Join the conversation on Twitter by following #Orb1. Image Credit: NASA via NASA http://ift.tt/1d2Qmng

Volcanic Plume Over Southern Atlantic Ocean Revealed Through False-Color Imagery

The South Sandwich Islands, in the far southern Atlantic Ocean, are often shrouded with thick cloud, making it difficult to view the region from space. Sometimes, however, the use of false-color imagery can be used to reveal events that would otherwise be obscured under cloud cover. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite flew over the South Sandwich Islands on April 19, 2014 and acquired this false-color image of the cloudy scene. This false-color image uses a combination of non-visible (middle infrared and infrared) and visible (red) light captured in bands 7, 2, and 1, respectively, to distinguish clouds from snow and ice. Here the ice-covered islands appear bright turquoise, the clouds light turquoise and the water in the ocean appears deep black. Because the volcanic plume is a moist mixture of gas and ash, it reflects all three forms of light relatively well, so it appears nearly white. In the north of this image, a thin plume of white rises from the volcano on Zavodovski island, the northernmost of the South Sandwich Islands and streams to the northeast. Further south, a wider white plume can be seen blowing across the Atlantic Ocean. This plume rises from the Mount Michael volcano, which is a young and frequently active stratovolcano located on Saunders Island, near the center of the South Sandwich Island chain. The white plume from Mount Michael forms a chain of swirling eddies as it blows to the northeast. To the south, similar eddies can be seen behind three other islands. These are known as Von Kármán vortices. These vortices can form nearly anywhere that fluid flow is disturbed by an object. Because the atmosphere behaves like a fluid, when streaming air hits a blunt object, such as a mountain peak, the wind is forced around the object. The disturbance in the flow of the wind propagates downstream in a double row of vortices that alternate their direction of rotation, much like the eddies seen behind a pier in a river as water rushes past. Image Credit: Jeff Schmaltz/MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC via NASA http://ift.tt/1lyXA6p

Tracking and Data Relay Satellite Launches

The umbilical tower drops back from a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 401 rocket as it lifts off Space Launch Complex 41 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Launch, with NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite-K or TDRS-K aboard, was at 8:48 p.m. EST on Jan. 30. The TDRS-K spacecraft is part of the next-generation series in the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System, a constellation of space-based communication satellites providing tracking, telemetry, command and high-bandwidth data return services. Photo credit: NASA/Tony Gray and Robert Murray via NASA http://ift.tt/U3Ho2B

The U.S. Gulf Coast at Night

ISS040-E-090540 (9 Aug. 2014) --- One of the Expedition 40 crew members aboard the International Space Station photographed this nighttime image showing city lights in at least half a dozen southern states from some 225 miles above the home planet. Lights from areas in the Gulf Coast states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, as well as some of the states that border them on the north, are visible. Image Credit: NASA via NASA http://ift.tt/1oVu5i3

Supermoon in Washington

A supermoon rises behind the Washington Monument, Sunday, June 23, 2013, in Washington. This year the supermoon is up to 13.5% larger and 30% brighter than a typical full moon is. This is a result of the moon reaching its perigree - the closest that it gets to the Earth during the course of its orbit. During perigree on June 23, the moon was about 221,824 miles away, as compared to the 252,581 miles away that it is at its furthest distance from the Earth (apogee). Image Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls via NASA http://ift.tt/11Iuu8m

Soyuz Rolls Out to Launch Pad

The Soyuz rocket is rolled out to the launch pad by train on Monday, Sept. 23, 2013, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Launch of the Soyuz rocket is scheduled for Sept. 26 and will send Expedition 37 Soyuz Commander Oleg Kotov, NASA Flight Engineer Michael Hopkins and Russian Flight Engineer Sergei Ryazansky on a five-and-a-half month mission aboard the International Space Station. Image Credit: NASA/Carla Cioffi via NASA http://ift.tt/16TT8s7

Round and Round

Just as Saturn's famous hexagonal shaped jet stream encircles the planet's north pole, the rings encircle the planet, as seen from Cassini's position high above. Around and around everything goes! This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 43 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Nov. 23, 2013 using a spectral filter that preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.6 million miles (2.5 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 97 degrees. Image scale is 93 miles (150 kilometers) per pixel. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit: http://ift.tt/Jcddhk and http://ift.tt/ZjpQgB. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute via NASA http://ift.tt/1fBgt5T

SpaceX Launches to the International Space Station

Space Launch Complex 40 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida is illuminated by a Falcon 9 rocket as it lifts off at 8:35 p.m. EDT carrying a Dragon capsule to orbit. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, built both the rocket and capsule for NASA's first Commercial Resupply Services, or CRS-1, mission to the International Space Station. SpaceX CRS-1 is an important step toward making America's microgravity research program self-sufficient by providing a way to deliver and return significant amounts of cargo, including science experiments, to and from the orbiting laboratory. NASA has contracted for 12 commercial resupply flights from SpaceX and eight from the Orbital Sciences Corp. Image Credit: NASA via NASA http://ift.tt/OMWG9m

Western Sahara Viewed From International Space Station

On May 23, 2014, Expedition 40 Commander Steve Swanson posted this photograph -- taken from the International Space Station -- to Instagram. Swanson noted, “Western Sahara – the contrast between the sand and the water is spectacular from here.” Swanson uploaded the first image from space to Instagram on April 7. He began posting imagery to the social media site during his pre-flight training. › View Instagram imagery from the International Space Station The three Expedition 40 crew members aboard the International Space Station worked advanced science this week while awaiting a new trio, set to lift off on Wednesday, May 28. Soyuz Commander and cosmonaut Maxim Suraev, NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman and European astronaut Alexander Gerst will launch aboard the Soyuz TMA-13M spacecraft at 3:57 p.m. EDT (1:57 a.m. May 29 Baikonur time) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Image Credit: NASA via NASA http://ift.tt/1kwxscg

Saturn's North Polar Hexagon

Saturn's north polar hexagon basks in the Sun's light now that spring has come to the northern hemisphere. Many smaller storms dot the north polar region and Saturn's signature rings, which appear to disappear on account of Saturn's shadow, put in an appearance in the background. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft's wide-angle camera on Nov. 27, 2012 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 750 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 403,000 miles (649,000 kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 21 degrees. Image scale is 22 miles (35 kilometers) per pixel. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute via NASA http://ift.tt/X9Ghw3

IRIS Launch Set for Thursday

Technicians and engineers at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California mate the Pegasus XL rocket with the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, solar observatory to the Orbital Sciences L-1011 carrier aircraft. The launch of NASA's IRIS mission has been delayed one day to 10:27 p.m. EDT on Thursday, June 27. Live NASA Television launch coverage begins at 9 p.m. IRIS will open a new window of discovery by tracing the flow of energy and plasma through the chromospheres and transition region into the sun's corona using spectrometry and imaging. The IRIS mission will observe how solar material moves, gathers energy and heats up as it travels through a largely unexplored region of the solar atmosphere. The interface region, located between the sun's visible surface and upper atmosphere, is where most of the sun's ultraviolet emission is generated. These emissions impact the near-Earth space environment and Earth's climate. Image Credit: NASA/Randy Beaudoin via NASA http://ift.tt/1aefUxg

Global Precipitation Measurement Core Observatory Aboard H-IIA Rocket

A Japanese H-IIA rocket carrying the NASA-Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory rolls out to launch pad 1 at the Tanegashima Space Center, Thursday, Feb. 27, 2014, Tanegashima, Japan. Once launched, the GPM spacecraft will collect information that unifies data from an international network of existing and future satellites to map global rainfall and snowfall every three hours. The rocket is scheduled to lift off during a launch window that opens at 1:37 p.m. EST on Thursday, Feb. 27 (3:37 a.m., Friday, Feb. 28 Japan time). GPM is an international satellite mission to provide next-generation observations of rain and snow worldwide every three hours. The GPM Core Observatory satellite carries advanced instruments that will set a new standard for precipitation measurements from space. The data they provide will be used to unify precipitation measurements made by an international network of partner satellites to quantify when, where, and how much it rains or snows around the world. The GPM mission will help advance our understanding of Earth's water and energy cycles, improve the forecasting of extreme events that cause natural disasters, and extend current capabilities of using satellite precipitation information to directly benefit society. > Read more Image Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls via NASA http://ift.tt/1dEhKW3

Election Day 2012

The American flag patch pictured here is from the left arm on Neil Armstrong's Apollo 11 suit. This image was taken in April 2006 at the National Air and Space Museum's Garber Facility in Suitland, Md. NASA astronauts Leroy Chiao, Edward Michael Fincke and Greg Chamitoff have all voted while aboard the International Space Station thanks to a bill passed in 1997 by Texas legislatures. The bill sets up a technical procedure for astronauts - nearly all of whom live in Houston - to vote from space. Current station Commander Suni Williams, a Florida resident, voted via absentee ballot before departing for her duties as part of Expedition 32 on the International Space Station. Image Credit: NASA via NASA http://ift.tt/RdtFkv

Spurting Plasma

A stream of plasma burst out from the sun, but since it lacked enough force to break away, most of it fell back into the sun (May 27, 2014). The video, seen in a combination of two wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light, covers a little over two hours. This eruption was minor and such events occur almost every day on the sun and suggest the kind of dynamic activity being driven by powerful magnetic forces near the sun's surface. › View 'Spurting Plasma' video Image credit: NASA/Solar Dynamics Observatory via NASA http://ift.tt/1vu9bYg

Great Sandy Desert, Australia

In northwest Australia, the Great Sandy Desert holds great geological interest as a zone of active sand dune movement. While a variety of dune forms appear across the region, this astronaut photograph features numerous linear dunes (about 25 meters high) separated in a roughly regular fashion (0.5 to 1.5 kilometers apart). The dunes are aligned to the prevailing winds that generated them, which typically blow from east to west. Where linear dunes converge, dune confluences point downwind. When you fly over such dune fields-either in an airplane or the International Space Station-the fire scars stand out. Where thin vegetation has been burned, the dunes appear red from the underlying sand; dunes appear darker where the vegetation remains. Astronaut photograph ISS035-E-9454 was acquired on March 25, 2013, with a Nikon D3S digital camera using a 400 millimeter lens, and is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations experiment and Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by the Expedition 35 crew. It has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. Image Credit: NASA via NASA http://ift.tt/16ImN3K

Astronaut Chris Cassidy Takes a Photo

NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, Expedition 36 flight engineer, uses a digital still camera during a session of extravehicular activity (EVA) as work continues on the International Space Station. A little more than one hour into the spacewalk on July 16, 2013, European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano (out of frame) reported water floating behind his head inside his helmet. The water was not an immediate health hazard for Parmitano, but Mission Control decided to end the spacewalk early. Image Credit: NASA via NASA http://ift.tt/18kVCzh

Taking Flight at Cape Canaveral

The United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket with NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft launches from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Space Launch Complex 41, Monday, Nov. 18, 2013, Cape Canaveral, Florida. NASA’s Mars-bound spacecraft, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN, or MAVEN, is the first spacecraft devoted to exploring and understanding the Martian upper atmosphere. Image Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls via NASA http://ift.tt/HWZSwc

Coastal Flooding in New Zealand, Early March

A powerful storm passed over New Zealand’s South Island in March 2014 and brought gale-force winds, torrential rains, and flooding to the city of Christchurch. A total of 74 millimeters (3 inches) of rain fell on March 4-5, according to MetService, New Zealand’s national meteorological service. More than 100 homes flooded and more than 4,000 lost power around the country’s third most populous city. Skies had cleared enough by March 6, 2014, for the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite to acquire this image showing the aftermath. Coastal communities are becoming increasingly vulnerable to the risk of damage and danger from flooding. NASA and NOAA are together launching a new opportunity for citizens to work with us on the very important topic of coastal flooding. This coastal flooding challenge is part of NASA’s third International Space Apps Challenge - a two-day global mass collaboration event on April 12-13, 2014. During these two days, citizens around the world are invited to engage directly with NASA to develop awe-inspiring software, hardware, and data visualizations. Last year’s event involved more than 9,000 global participants in 83 locations. This year will introduce more than 60 robust challenges clustered in five themes: asteroids, Earth watch, human spaceflight, robotics, and space technology. The Coastal Inundation In Your Community challenge is one of four climate-related challenges using data provided by NASA, NOAA and EPA. > 2014 International Space Apps Challenge: Coastal Inundation in Your Community > NASA Invites Citizens to Collaborate on Coastal Flooding Challenge Image Credit: NASA - Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC via NASA http://ift.tt/PTSAOh

Helios-A Solar Probe At Launch Complex

The Helios-A solar probe launched on Dec. 10, 1974 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. As it looped around the Sun in an orbit that took it from Earth's orbit (1 AU from the Sun) to about 0.3 AU from the Sun and back again, Helios-A studied the solar wind, magnetic and electric fields, cosmic rays, and dust in interplanetary space. It flew within 47 million km of the Sun at a speed of 238,000 km per hour, the closest any human-made object had been. Its data indicated the presence of 15 times more micrometeorites close to the Sun than there are near Earth. Image Credit: NASA via NASA http://ift.tt/RWFBuE

Windswept Valleys in Northern Africa

Expedition 40 Flight Engineer Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency posted this photograph of windswept valleys in Northern Africa, taken from the International Space Station, to social media on July 6, 2014. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) regularly photograph the Earth from their unique point of view located 200 miles above the surface. These photographs help to 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. Image Credit: Alexander Gerst/ESA/NASA via NASA http://ift.tt/1jgM55F

X-48 Project Completes Flight Research

NASA's remotely piloted X-48C hybrid-wing-body subscale aircraft, which demonstrates technology concepts for cleaner and quieter commercial air travel, completed an eight-month flight research campaign on April 9, 2013. In this image, the aircraft flies over the intersection of several runways adjacent to the compass rose on Rogers Dry Lake at Edwards Air Force Base during one of the sub-scale aircraft's final test flights on Feb. 28, 2013. The scale-model aircraft, shaped like a manta ray, was designed by The Boeing Co., built by Cranfield Aerospace Limited of the United Kingdom, and flown in partnership with NASA. The X-48C is a version of NASA's X-48B blended wing body aircraft modified to evaluate the low-speed stability and control of a low-noise version of a notional hybrid-wing-body design. This design features a flattened fuselage with no tail, and engines mounted on top of the fuselage at the rear of the plane. The design stems from concept studies for commercial aircraft that could be flying within 20 years. The studies are under way in NASA's Environmentally Responsible Aviation Project. Image Credit: NASA / Carla Thomas via NASA http://ift.tt/ZuRh65

NASA's Next Mars Mission Arrives at Kennedy Space Center for Launch Processing

A crane lifts NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility on Aug. 3, 2013, at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The spacecraft was flown to Kennedy Space Center for launch processing from Buckley Air Force Base in Colorado near the Lockheed Martin facility in Littleton, Colo., where it was built. MAVEN is to lift off on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket in November, 2013 to begin a 10-month voyage to Mars. It is the first mission dedicated to studying Mars' upper atmosphere and scientists hope to find traces of the ancient environment thought to have existed there. Image Credit: NASA/Tim Jacobs via NASA http://ift.tt/1bbZ5Bh

NASA’s Mars Spacecraft Maneuvers to Prepare for Close Comet Flyby

NASA’s Mars Spacecraft Maneuvers to Prepare for Close Comet Flyby



July 25, 2014

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New NASA Science Arrives at Space Station Aboard Orbital Sciences Cygnus Spacecraft

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station Sunday used a robotic arm to capture and attach the Cygnus supply spacecraft, which carried dozens of new science experiments from across the country and the world to the orbiting laboratory. The arrival capped the first successful contracted cargo delivery by Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., for NASA.



January 12, 2014

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NASA Selects Contractor for Financial Support Services

NASA has selected Logical-R Joint Venture of Houston to perform financial support services at the agency's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.



September 10, 2014

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Long-Running NASA/CNES Ocean Satellite Takes Final Bow

The curtain has come down on a superstar of the satellite oceanography world that played the "Great Blue Way" of the world's ocean for 11 1/2 years.



July 03, 2013

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NASA Selects Stellar Interns as Student Ambassadors

NASA has inducted 105 top-performing interns, representing 29 states and 67 universities, into its 2014 Student Ambassadors Virtual Community.



February 28, 2014

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NASA Aircraft Take to Skies over Houston for Air Pollution Study

A multi-year NASA science mission soon will be airborne over Houston to help scientists measure and forecast air quality from space.



August 15, 2013

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NASA's Kepler Telescope Discovers First Earth-Size Planet in 'Habitable Zone'

Using NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered the first Earth-size planet orbiting a star in the "habitable zone" -- the range of distance from a star where liquid water might pool on the surface of an orbiting planet. The discovery of Kepler-186f confirms that planets the size of Earth exist in the habitable zone of stars other than our sun.



April 17, 2014

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Astronauts Practice Launching in NASA's New Orion Spacecraft

For the first time, NASA astronauts are practicing a launch into space aboard the agency's Orion spacecraft, and provided feedback on the new capsule's cockpit design.



September 27, 2013

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The Moon, In Depth

Explore a new collection of 3D lunar landscapes.



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NASA Joins White House, from Ground and Space, to Discuss State of STEM Education in America

NASA will join the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) Wednesday, Jan. 21 for its third annual State of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (SoSTEM) event. The event will air live on NASA Television, beginning at 1 p.m. EST, and also will be live-streamed online.



January 20, 2015

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Astronaut Buzz Aldrin in the Apollo 11 Lunar Module

This July 20, 1969 photograph of the interior view of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module shows astronaut Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin, Jr. during the lunar landing mission. The picture was taken by astronaut Neil A. Armstrong, commander, prior to the landing. Buzz Aldrin was born in Montclair, New Jersey, on Jan. 20, 1930. Aldrin became an astronaut during the selection of the third group by NASA in October 1963. On Nov. 11, 1966 he orbited aboard the Gemini XII spacecraft, a 4-day 59-revolution flight that successfully ended the Gemini program. During Project Gemini, Aldrin became one of the key figures working on the problem of rendezvous of spacecraft in Earth or lunar orbit, and docking them together for spaceflight. Aldrin was chosen as a member of the three-person Apollo 11 crew that landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, fulfilling the mandate of President John F. Kennedy to send Americans to the moon before the end of the decade. Aldrin was the second American to set foot on the lunar surface. Image Credit: NASA via NASA http://ift.tt/1C3pGiR

New Dawn images of Ceres: comparable to Hubble

Dawn has captured a series of photos of a rotating Ceres whose resolution is very close to Hubble's, and they show tantalizing surface details.



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NASA's Pluto Mission Seeks to Confuse People

Pluto fans complained that demotion from planet status would confuse students who were taught about "9 planets" & make textbooks wrong 1/2— plutotoday (@plutotoday) January 20, 2015 Now were are told by Pluto fans that planets are moons and...



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Pretty Picture: Comet Lovejoy

Astrophotgrapher Adam Block shares an image of Comet Lovejoy, which is currently visible with binoculars.



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Why NASA Did Not Pick SNC

NASA Releases Commercial Crew Source Selection Statement, SpaceRef "[HEOMD AA Bill Gerstenmaier]: On August 6, 2014, the Source Evaluation Board (SEE!) appointed to evaluate proposals for the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability Contract (CCtCap) under Request for Proposals (RFP) NNK14467515R presented...



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Please Consider Supporting "Fight for Space"

Fight for Space: NASA & Space Exploration Documentary, Kickstarter "Fight for Space" is a feature length documentary film that explores the economic and cultural benefits of human space exploration, and examines the historical and political events that have led to...



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Dawn Approaches Ceres

Ceres is the largest asteroid in the solar system—about 970 km in diameter—but so far from Earth that it generally just looks like a blurry disk at best.

But that’s about to change. A lot. The Dawn spacecraft is slowly edging toward the asteroid, and on Jan. 13, 2015 it took a series (haha! I love homonyms) of images that have been stitched together to make this nifty animation:

Dawn was about 383,000 km (238,000 miles) from Ceres when it took those shots, which is the same distance the Earth is from the Moon. Details are still difficult to make out (the pictures were taken with the framing camera, which has lower resolution than the science camera that will be used) but you can see a bright spot (I suspect the same one seen in earlier Hubble images) and some large craters. You can also see Ceres is noticeably flattened; it’s about seven percent wider across the equator than through the poles (though to be fair I think that looks a bit exaggerated due to the location of the terminator, the day-night line).

These images are tantalizing—they rival but don’t quite surpass the best images of Ceres taken by Hubble—but in a little while we’ll be seeing much, much more detailed images of this world. It’ll eventually orbit only a few hundred kilometers over the surface, and the images returned will be quite high resolution indeed.

Dawn launched in 2007 after an interesting history (it was canceled by NASA, then reinstated), and reached the asteroid Vesta in 2011. It orbited Vesta for over a year, mapping its surface in exquisite detail. It left Vesta in September 2012, and spent the next couple of years moving toward Ceres. It’s approaching now, and is expected to achieve orbit in early March.

Dawn uses an innovative engine called an ion drive. Any engine to move a spacecraft uses Newton’s Third Law of Motion: Every action has an opposite and equal reaction. If you throw something really hard in one direction, it pushes on you equally hard in the opposite direction.

Rockets usually combine a huge amount of chemicals together, which get very hot, expand rapidly, and blow out the back of the rocket. This is a pretty violent effect, and produces a lot of thrust.

Ion engines are different. They use either magnets or electric fields to accelerate and shoot individual atoms out the back of the engine. The atoms have a lot less mass than what’s used in chemical rockets, but they move a lot faster. The overall effect is a very low but extremely efficient thrust, and you can keep the engine blowing out atoms for years at a time, building up a huge speed. Dawn’s engines use an electric field to fling out xenon ions, and its fuel tank only carries about 425 kg (940 pounds) of fuel; in a day it only uses about 280 grams.

But that’s why it’s taken so long to go from Vesta to Ceres; it thrusts low but long. Now it’s approaching the giant asteroid, and soon it will go from a fuzzy disk to a fantastically detailed and amazing world. Stay tuned. This is going to be great.

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