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IRIS Readies For a New Challenge
NASA is getting ready to launch a new mission, a mission to observe a mysterious region of the solar atmosphere that may be crucial to understanding what powers space weather. In late June 2013, the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, will launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. IRIS will tease out the rules governing the lowest layers of the solar atmosphere — historically some of the hardest to untangle. Known as the solar interface region, this is one of the most complex areas in the sun’s atmosphere: all the energy that drives solar activity travels through it. The interface region lies between the sun’s 6,000-degree, white-hot, visible surface, the photosphere, and the much hotter multi-million-degree upper corona. Interactions between the violently moving plasma and the sun’s magnetic field in this area may well be the source of the energy that heats the corona to its million-degree temperatures, some hundreds and occasionally thousands of times hotter than
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Mason Peck, NASA's chief technologist, is doing an AMA on reddit, right now
I see massless exploration, long-duration crewed missions to and Mars, and protecting our planet from the ever-present threat of asteroids. As NASA’s chief technologist, my job is to champion technology and innovation – in space and on our home planet. That means encouraging partnerships with small companies to transfer NASA-developed technology into the market. It also means opening up technology challenges to citizen scientists to get everybody involved in solving the issues we face. I think our future is bright, and I believe it’s going to take all of us to get there. What do you see as our future in space?
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Brace yourself for another asteroid flyby
To quote science reporter Deborah Netburn:
It’s 1.7 miles long. Its surface is covered in a sticky black substance similar to the gunk at the bottom of a barbecue. If it impacted Earth it would probably result in global extinction. Good thing it is just making a flyby.
At approximately 1:59 p.m. PDT May 31, Asteroid 1998 QE2 will make a close (by galactic standards) pass by our home planet. Coming within just 3.6 million miles of Earth, the asteroid will be so close that many of its features will be visible on radar.
For more details on the asteroid, including its possible origin, at Science Now.
Photo: NASA / JPL / Caltech
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Earth’s Siblings: Inside The Planets
Click each for a neat and informative view of the neighboring planets in our Solar System.
via SPACE
(via spaceandstuffidk)
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With deference to the genius of David Bowie, here’s Space Oddity, recorded on Station. A last glimpse of the World.
Huge thanks in the making of the video to the talented trio of Emm Gryner, Joe Corcoran and Andrew Tidby, plus Evan Hadfield and all at the CSA. -
Astronauts Fix Phantom Space Station Leak
During an unscheduled spacewalk on the space station’s exterior on Saturday morning, NASA astronauts Tom Marshburn and Chris Cassidy carried out the mother of all plumbing jobs: They detached a suspect ammonia pump, replaced it with a spare and watched for any further ammonia leakage.
“It will take some diagnostics, still, over the course of the next several days by the thermal systems specialists to fully determine that we have solved the problem of the ammonia leak,” said NASA commentator Rob Navias during the live NASA TV spacewalk broadcast. “But so far, so good.” Read more
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TIME and Space
Spacecraft and telescopes are not built by people interested in what’s going on at home. Rockets fly in one direction: up. Telescopes point in one direction: out. Of all the cosmic bodies studied in the long history of astronomy and space travel, the one that got the least attention was the one that ought to matter most to us—Earth.
That changed when NASA created the Landsat program, a series of satellites that would perpetually orbit our planet, looking not out but down. Surveillance spacecraft had done that before, of course, but they paid attention only to military or tactical sites. Landsat was a notable exception, built not for spycraft but for public monitoring of how the human species was altering the surface of the planet. Two generations, eight satellites and millions of pictures later, the space agency, along with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), has accumulated a stunning catalog of images that, when riffled through and stitched together, create a high-definition slide show of our rapidly changing Earth. TIME is proud to host the public unveiling of these images from orbit, which for the first time date all the way back to 1984.
Over here is Dubai, growing from sparse desert metropolis to modern, sprawling megalopolis. Over there are the central-pivot irrigation systems turning the sands of Saudi Arabia into an agricultural breadbasket — a surreal green-on-brown polka-dot pattern in the desert. Elsewhere is the bad news: the high-speed retreat of Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska; the West Virginia Mountains decapitated by the mining industry; the denuded forests of the Amazon, cut to stubble by loggers.
It took the folks at Google to upgrade these choppy visual sequences from crude flip-book quality to true video footage. With the help of massive amounts of computer muscle, they have scrubbed away cloud cover, filled in missing pixels, digitally stitched puzzle-piece pictures together, until the growing, thriving, sometimes dying planet is revealed in all its dynamic churn. The images are striking not just because of their vast sweep of geography and time but also because of their staggering detail. Consider: a standard TV image uses about one-third of a million pixels per frame, while a high-definition image uses 2 million. The Landsat images, by contrast, weigh in at 1.8 trillion pixels per frame, the equivalent of 900,000 high-def TVs assembled into a single mosaic.
These Timelapse pictures tell the pretty and not-so-pretty story of a finite planet and how its residents are treating it — razing even as we build, destroying even as we preserve. It takes a certain amount of courage to look at the videos, but once you start, it’s impossible to look away.
(via earth-as-art)
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An Astronomer’s Fantasy: Planets in the Lab
If astronomers could somehow pull planets out of the sky and analyze them in the laboratory, it might look something like this artistically altered image illustrating new research from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The infrared observatory allows astronomers to study closely the atmospheres of hot Jupiter planets — those outside our solar system that orbit near the blistering heat of their stars.
In this image, an artistic version of a hot Jupiter inspired by computer simulations has been inserted into a photo showing a Spitzer researcher, Heather Knutson, in a laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where she works. In reality, Knutson does not work in a lab, nor wear a lab coat and goggles, but scrutinizes telescope data from her office computer.
Knutson is the co-author of a new study led by Nikole Lewis from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. They used Spitzer to monitor a hot Jupiter, called HAT-P-2b, as it orbited all the way around its star in an eccentric, comet-like orbit. This allowed the team to watch the planet heat up as it moved closer to the star, and cool down as it moved away — almost like putting a Bunsen burner to a planet in a laboratory.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. For more information about Spitzer, visit http://spitzer.caltech.edu and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer.
Image Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech
Image Addition Date:2013-05-06 -
Gigantic Rolling Wave Captured on the Sun
A coronal mass ejection (CME) erupted from just around the edge of the sun on May 1, 2013, in a gigantic rolling wave. CMEs can shoot over a billion tons of particles into space at over a million miles per hour. This CME occurred on the sun’s limb and is not headed toward Earth. The video (seen here), taken in extreme ultraviolet light by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), covers about two and a half hours.
Credit: NASA/Goddard/SDO
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Top: Space Shuttle Atlantis docked with Mir on 4 July 1995. Cosmonauts Anatoliy Y. Solovyev and Nikolai M. Budarin, who had arrive onboard Atlantis five days earlier, took Soyuz TM-21 for a fly-around photo survey prior to Atlantis undocking for her return to Earth. This was the first time a shuttle had docked with Mir.
Bottom: Two shots of the Space Shuttle Endeavour docked with the ISS, as photographed by the departing Soyuz TMA-20 spacecraft on 23 May 2011, during the STS-134 mission. (There are a lot more from this fly-around here)
(via n-a-s-a)
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Enter the Vortex … in Psychedelic Color
This spectacular, vertigo inducing, false-color image from NASA’s Cassini mission highlights the storms at Saturn’s north pole. The angry eye of a hurricane-like storm appears dark red while the fast-moving hexagonal jet stream framing it is a yellowish green. Low-lying clouds circling inside the hexagonal feature appear as muted orange color. A second, smaller vortex pops out in teal at the lower right of the image. The rings of Saturn appear in vivid blue at the top right.
The images were taken with Cassini’s wide-angle camera using a combination of spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light. The images filtered at 890 nanometers are projected as blue. The images filtered at 728 nanometers are projected as green, and images filtered at 752 nanometers are projected as red. At Saturn, this scheme means colors correlate to different altitudes in the planet’s polar atmosphere: red indicates deep, while green shows clouds that are higher in altitude. High clouds are typically associated with locations of intense upwelling in a storm. These images help scientists learn the distribution and frequencies of such storms. The rings are bright blue in this color scheme because there is no methane gas between the ring particles and the camera.
The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 261,000 miles (419,000 kilometers) from Saturn and at a sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 94 degrees. Image scale is 13 miles (22 kilometers) per pixel.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. NASA’s 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://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
Image Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI
Image Addition Date:2013-04-29 -
Like a proud peacock displaying its tail, Enceladus shows off its beautiful plume to the Cassini spacecraft’s cameras.
Enceladus (313 miles, or 504 kilometers across) is seen here illuminated by light reflected off Saturn.
This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Enceladus. North on Enceladus is up and rotated 45 degrees to the right. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 18, 2013.
The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 483,000 miles (777,000 kilometers) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 173 degrees. Image scale is 3 miles (5 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://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. The Cassini imaging team homepage is athttp://ciclops.org.
Image Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Image Addition Date:2013-04-29 -
npr:
Never mind the big-budget NASA satellites. A team of young engineers has tricked out a few off-the-shelf cellphones and sent them to space. The smartphones are already above us, sending images and data back to ham radio operators on Earth.
via Can You Hear Me Now? Cellphone Satellites Phone Home
Photo: NASA Ames Research Center
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Five images of Saturn’s rings, taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft between 2009 and 2012, show clouds of material ejected from impacts of small objects into the rings. Clockwise from top left are two views of one cloud in the A ring, taken 24.5 hours apart, a cloud in the C ring, one in the B ring, and another in the C ring. Arrows in the annotated version point to the cloud structures, which spread out at visibly different angles than the surrounding ring features.
The clouds of ejected material were visible because of the angle sunlight was hitting the Saturn system and the position of the spacecraft. The first four images were taken near the time of Saturn equinox, when sunlight strikes the rings at very shallow angles, nearly directly edge-on. During Saturn equinox, which occurs only every 14.5 Earth years, the ejecta clouds were caught in sunlight because they were elevated out of the ring plane. The last image was taken in 2012 at a very high-phase angle, which is the sun-Saturn-spacecraft angle. This geometry enabled Cassini to see the clouds of dust-sized particles in the same way that dust on a surface is easier to see when the viewer is looking toward a light source.
The angle that the clouds are canted gives the time elapsed since the cloud was formed (see PIA14941). The A ring cloud formed 24 hours before its first apparition in the top left box; it formed 48.5 hours before the top middle image. The other three clouds were approximately 13 hours, four hours, and one hour old (respectively) at the times they were seen. See PIA11674 for more information on ring impacts.
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://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. The Cassini imaging team homepage is athttp://ciclops.org.
Image Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Cornell
Image Addition Date:2013-04-25
