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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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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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Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 Approaching Jupiter in 1994
This is a composite photo, assembled from separate images of Jupiter and comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, as imaged by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope in 1994.
Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was discovered by astronomers Carolyn and Eugene M. Shoemaker and David Levy on March 24, 1993. It was the first comet observed to be orbiting a planet — in this case, Jupiter — rather than the sun. The effect of Jupiter’s tidal forces had already torn the celestial body apart and, eventually, the fragments collided with Jupiter between July 16 and 22, 1994.
The image of the comet, showing 21 fragments, was taken on May 17, 1994. The image of Jupiter was taken on May 18, 1994. The dark spot on the planet is the shadow of the inner moon lo. The apparent angular size of Jupiter relative to the comet, and its angular separation from the comet when the images were taken, have been modified for illustration purposes.
Image Credit:NASA, ESA, H. Weaver and E. Smith (STScI) and J. Trauger and R. Evans (NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
Image Addition Date:2013-04-23 -
Hidden deep in Obama’s Fiscal Year 2014 Budget is this item: “Begins work on a mission to rendezvous with—and then move—a small asteroid.”
Yep:
A budget plan that President Barack Obama will release Wednesday would charge NASA Glenn Research Center with developing a solar electric propulsion system for a spaceship that will collect an asteroid and park it in the moon’s orbit so astronauts can conduct research on it.
Moving the giant space rock would give NASA experience deflecting asteroids that could prove vital to averting potential Earth collisions such as one believed to have caused a mass dinosaur extinction millions of years ago. Some asteroids also contain rare elements that mining companies are eager to exploit, NASA officials said.
See what else you can find that’s particularly noteworthy, and tell us.
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The Cassini spacecraft peers through Titan’s thick clouds to spy on the region dubbed “Senkyo” by scientists. The dark features include vast fields of dunes, composed of solid hydrocarbon particles precipitated out of Titan’s atmosphere. And Titan’s southern pole is shrouded in the recently formed polar vortex.
Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is 3,200 miles (5,150 kilometers) across.
For more on Senkyo, see PIA08231. For a color image of the south polar vortex on Titan, see PIA14919. For a movie of the vortex, see PIA14920.
Lit terrain seen here is on the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Titan. North on Titan is up and rotated 18 degrees to the right. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 5, 2013 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 938 nanometers.
The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 750,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 79 degrees. Image scale is 4 miles (7 kilometers) per pixel.
Image Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Image Addition Date:2013-04-08 -
Erupting into Space
An 86-mile-high volcanic plume explodes above the horizon of Jupiter’s moon Io. The plume is erupting over a caldera (volcanic depression), named Pillan Patera, after a South American god of thunder, fire, and volcanoes.
Galileo, June 28, 1997
Image Number: WEB11411-2010
Credit: NASA; JPL; PIRL; University of Arizona; Kinetikon Pictures -
The GIFs above are from this beautiful video (made with footage shot by NASA and ESA using the Cassini spacecraft).
Planetary scientist (and UCLA alum) Dr. Ashwin Vasavada participated with the Cassini mission to Saturn: he played a major role in science planning for Saturn atmospheric imaging.
(via itsfullofstars)
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Taken Under the ‘Wing’ of the Small Magellanic Cloud
The tip of the “wing” of the Small Magellanic Cloud galaxy is dazzling in this new view from NASA’s Great Observatories. The Small Magellanic Cloud, or SMC, is a small galaxy about 200,000 light-years way that orbits our own Milky Way spiral galaxy.
The colors represent wavelengths of light across a broad spectrum. X-rays from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory are shown in purple; visible-light from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is colored red, green and blue; and infrared observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope are also represented in red.
The spiral galaxy seen in the lower corner is actually behind this nebula. Other distant galaxies located hundreds of millions of light-years or more away can be seen sprinkled around the edge of the image.
The SMC is one of the Milky Way’s closest galactic neighbors. Even though it is a small, or so-called dwarf galaxy, the SMC is so bright that it is visible to the unaided eye from the Southern Hemisphere and near the equator. Many navigators, including Ferdinand Magellan who lends his name to the SMC, used it to help find their way across the oceans.
Modern astronomers are also interested in studying the SMC (and its cousin, the Large Magellanic Cloud), but for very different reasons. Because the SMC is so close and bright, it offers an opportunity to study phenomena that are difficult to examine in more distant galaxies. New Chandra data of the SMC have provided one such discovery: the first detection of X-ray emission from young stars, with masses similar to our sun, outside our Milky Way galaxy.
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 andhttp://www.nasa.gov/spitzer.
Image Credit:NASA/CXC/JPL-Caltech/STScI
Image Addition Date:2013-04-03 -
Active Plume Observed at Mercury
In a groundbreaking discovery for Mercury science, the MESSENGER spacecraft imaged a plume of material erupting from the surface of the innermost planet. In an MDIS image taken early this morning, a bright source of light may be seen above Mercury’s southern hemisphere. Located at approximately 67°S, 55°E, close to the newly named Alver basin, this light source appears to be
MESSENGER team members are currently analyzing images of the eruption. One hypothesis under consideration is that the brightness indicates the presence of a “fire fountain,” an eruption during which lava is ejected from depth in a jet-like spray of molten rock. There also appears to be a dimmer cloud of material above the central plume. Under the fire fountain hypothesis, this higher cloud may be composed of smaller droplets of lava of a size that allows them to be blasted to greater altitudes. Most of these droplets will probably fall back to the surface, producing a distinctive “pyroclastic halo” around the vent like those seen elsewhere on Mercury.
An alternative possibility is that the plume is a “geyser” of volatile materials, analogous to the plume at Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Under this scenario, a pocket of volatile-rich material may have been heated by the intrusion of subsurface magma, solar tidal dissipation, or some other process, fueling a geyser-like eruption at the surface. Because of the recent identification of water ice at Mercury’s poles, the MESSENGER team is pursuing the idea that water may be involved in the eruption. Given that possibility and the date of the discovery, the team has already proposed to the International Astronomical Union that the feature be given the name “Poisson d’Avril.”
Scientists will continue to acquire and examine as many images of the eruption as possible. The MESSENGER spacecraft has been conducting orbital operations at Mercury for two years, first during its primary mission and then during a year-long extended mission. The MESSENGER team recently submitted a proposal to NASA to extend the mission further by an additional two years of orbital operations.
Image Credit:NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
Image Addition Date:2013-04-01 -
Like a shepherd guarding his sheep, Prometheus keeps a lonely watch over the F ring.
Gravitational interactions between the ring and its shepherd moons, Prometheus (53 miles, or 86 kilometers across) and Pandora (not shown here), keep the F ring narrowly confined. The five small, bright dots in this image (one of them seen through the A ring, which is on the right) are stars.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 52 degrees below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 15, 2013.
Image Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Image Addition Date:2013-04-01 -
Space shuttle Enterprise added to historic places registry
The test orbiter is the first of NASA’s retired space shuttles to receive the distinction.
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Linda Godwin performing a spacewalk on STS-108. (x)
(via spaceandstuffidk)
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Peering Deep into Jupiter’s Atmosphere
The dark hot spot in this false-color image from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft is a window deep into Jupiter’s atmosphere. All around it are layers of higher clouds, with colors indicating which layer of the atmosphere the clouds are in. The bluish clouds to the right are in the upper troposphere, or perhaps higher still, in the stratosphere. The reddish gyre under the hot spot to the right and the large reddish plume at its lower left are in the lower troposphere. In addition, a high, gauzy haze covers part of the frame. An annotated version of this image highlights the hot spot in the middle with an arrow and boxes around the plume and the gyre.
This image was taken on Dec. 13, 2000, by Cassini’s imaging science subsystem.
