Uni_pla_mvemjsun (2024)

22/10/2020

Studying Aircraft Noise
An array of 960 microphones is seen here off the end of runway 11 at Boeing's research facility near Glasgow, Montana. The microphones were used by NASA to record the sound of a low-flying 787-10 Dreamliner passing overhead as part of the Chicago-based company's 2020 ecoDemonstrator program during late August and early September. NASA researchers are studying how aircraft noise changes based on the interaction and placement of an airliner's jet engines in relation to the main airframe and wing. Another 214 microphones were wired to the exterior of the 787 to aid in the studies. The data will be used to help design future airliners be quieter.

10/10/2020

'Phase II of NASAs Pilot Breathing Assessment Complete' news article from the http://nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/features/pilot-breathing-assessment-program-completes-final-phase.html

08/10/2020

Thumbs Up From Out of This World
In this image from July 2020, NASA spacewalkers (from left) Bob Behnken and Chris Cassidy give a thumbs up during a spacewalk to install hardware and upgrade International Space Station systems. They were photographed by the crew from inside the cupola, the orbiting lab's "window to the world."

Behnken arrived on the station as a member of the Demo-2 crew. The Demo-2 mission was the first launch with astronauts of the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station as part of the agency's Commercial Crew Program. Cassidy is the Expedition 63 commander.

07/10/2020

Grappling With the Future
The tip of the Canadarm2 robotic arm, also formally known as the Latching End Effector, is pictured as the International Space Station soared over the South Pacific Ocean and into an orbital sunrise in this image taken on Sept. 30, 2020. The Canadarm2 is designed to grapple hardware, science experiments, and approaching spaceships.

06/10/2020

'Space Communications: 7 Things You Need to Know' news article from the http://nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/space-communications-7-things-you-need-to-know

05/10/2020

Antares Rocket Launches to the Space Station
A Northrop Grumman Antares rocket, with the company's Cygnus spacecraft aboard, launches at 9:16 p.m. EDT, Friday, Oct. 2, 2020, from the Mid Atlantic Regional Spaceport's Pad-0A, at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Northrop Grumman's 14th contracted cargo resupply mission for NASA to the International Space Station is carrying nearly 8,000 pounds of science and research, crew supplies, and vehicle hardware to the orbital laboratory and its crew.

On Monday, Oct. 5, Cygnus was successfully berthed to the Node 1 Nadir on the station.

04/10/2020

'5 Things to Know About Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich' news article from the http://nasa.gov/feature/jpl/5-things-to-know-about-sentinel-6-michael-freilich

01/10/2020

Satellite Captures Active Fires in the Western U.S.
Our Aqua satellite captured this composite visible (left) and infrared (right) image on Sep. 29, 2020, which shows that fires and smoke continue to dominate the landscape of the western U.S. The visible image shows the smoke and the infrared image shows the heat from the fires (orange points). The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL Fire) page for Sep. 30 finds many large fires still active throughout California and the Pacific Northwest. The August Complex in California continues to be the largest wildfire still active and uncontained at 949,055 acres, located in Glenn, Lake, Mendocino, Tehama, and Trinity Counties. The August Complex is the largest wildfire in California's history having surpassed the Mendocino Complex fire which burned 459,123 acres in July 2018. In this image, the smoke which had previously crossed the country by heading east has now shifted and is heading out to the west, billowing out over the Pacific Ocean.

Further complicating fighting the fires is the weather pattern predicted by the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) in its daily report from Sep. 30, 2020: "A broad upper ridge building over the West will yield increasingly hot, dry, and unstable conditions for California, the Desert Southwest, and the Great Basin. Fires actively burning in Northern California will be challenged by near or record-breaking heat and very low relative humidities." The NIFC also provides predictive maps to show areas that have above normal significant wildland fire potential.

NASA's satellite instruments are often the first to detect wildfires burning in remote regions, and the locations of new fires are sent directly to land managers worldwide within hours of the satellite overpass. Together, NASA instruments detect actively burning fires, track the transport of smoke from fires, provide information for fire management, and map the extent of changes to ecosystems, based on the extent and severity of burn scars.

01/10/2020

Soyuz MS-16 Spacecraft Docked to the Space Station
Pictured is the Soyuz MS-16 crew ship, currently docked to the International Space Station's Poisk module. The is the same spacecraft that launched, and will bring home, Expedition 63 Commander Chris Cassidy, Soyuz Commander Anatoly Ivanishin, and cosmonaut Ivan Vagner. Expedition 63 will depart the station and land in Kazakhstan on Oct. 21, 2020.

01/10/2020

Solis Lacus: The Eye of Mars

As telescopes around planet Earth watch, Mars is growing brighter in night skies, approaching its 2020 opposition on October 13. Mars looks like its watching too in this view of the Red Planet from September 22. Mars' disk is already near its maximum apparent size for earthbound telescopes, less than 1/80th the apparent diameter of a Full Moon. The seasonally shrinking south polar cap is at the bottom and hazy northern clouds are at the top. A circular, dark albedo feature, Solis Lacus (Lake of the Sun), is just below and left of disk center. Surrounded by a light area south of Valles Marineris, Solis Lacus looks like a planet-sized pupil, famously known as The Eye of Mars . Near the turn of the 20th century, astronomer and avid Mars watcher Percival Lowell associated the Eye of Mars with a conjunction of canals he charted in his drawings of the Red Planet. Broad, visible changes in the size and shape of the Eye of Mars are now understood from high resolution surface images to be due to dust transported by winds in the thin Martian atmosphere.

29/09/2020

Dragonfly Launch Moved to 2027
Dragonfly is a NASA mission that delivers a rotorcraft to Saturn’s moon Titan to advance our search for the building blocks of life. While Dragonfly was originally scheduled to launch in 2026, NASA has requested the Dragonfly team pursue their alternative launch readiness date in 2027. No changes will be needed to the mission architecture to accommodate this new date, and launching at a later date will not affect Dragonfly’s science return or capabilities once at Titan.
The decision to pursue the alternative launch date is based on factors external to the Dragonfly project team, including COVID-19’s impact on the Planetary Science Division’s budget.
“NASA has the utmost confidence in the Dragonfly team to deliver a successful mission that conducts compelling science,” said Lori Glaze, Director for the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Dragonfly will significantly increase our understanding of this richly organic world and help answer key astrobiology questions in our search to understand the processes that supported the development of life on Earth.”
Dragonfly marks the first time NASA will fly a multi-rotor vehicle for science on another planet. Taking advantage of Titan’s dense atmosphere – four times denser than Earth’s – it will also become the first vehicle ever to fly its entire science payload to multiple locations for repeatable and targeted access to surface materials. By surveying dozens of locations across the icy world, Dragonfly will characterize the habitability of Titan’s environment and investigate the progression of its prebiotic chemistry.

29/09/2020

'NASA's New Mars Rover Is Ready for Space Lasers' news article from the http://nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasas-new-mars-rover-is-ready-for-space-lasers

25/09/2020

Moon over Andromeda

The Great Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda (also known as M31), a mere 2.5 million light-years distant, is the closest large spiral to our own Milky Way. Andromeda is visible to the unaided eye as a small, faint, fuzzy patch, but because its surface brightness is so low, casual skygazers can't appreciate the galaxy's impressive extent in planet Earth's sky. This entertaining composite image compares the angular size of the nearby galaxy to a brighter, more familiar celestial sight. In it, a deep exposure of Andromeda, tracing beautiful blue star clusters in spiral arms far beyond the bright yellow core, is combined with a typical view of a nearly full Moon. Shown at the same angular scale, the Moon covers about 1/2 degree on the sky, while the galaxy is clearly several times that size. The deep Andromeda exposure also includes two bright satellite galaxies, M32 and M110 (below and right).

22/09/2020

Ellen Ochoa Shakes Hands with First Humanoid Robot to Head to Station
Then-NASA Johnson Space Center deputy director Ellen Ochoa poses for a photo with Robonaut 2 (R2) during media day in the Space Vehicle Mock-up Facility on Aug. 4, 2010. R2 hitched a ride to the International Space Station with the STS-133. It was the first humanoid robot to travel to space and the first U.S.-built robot to visit the station. R2 will stay on the space station indefinitely to allow engineers on the ground to learn more about how humanoid robots fare in microgravity.

Ochoa became Johnson Center director in 2012 and retired from that position in 2018. She is veteran of four space shuttle flights and holds a doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford.

21/09/2020

Moon Shadow Over Jupiter
Jupiter's volcanically active moon Io casts its shadow on the planet in this dramatic image from NASA's Juno spacecraft. As with solar eclipses on the Earth, within the dark circle racing across Jupiter's cloud tops one would witness a full solar eclipse as Io passes in front of the Sun.

Such events occur frequently on Jupiter because it is a large planet with many moons. In addition, unlike most other planets in our solar system, Jupiter's axis is not highly tilted relative to its orbit, so the Sun never strays far from Jupiter's equatorial plane (+/- 3 degrees). This means Jupiter's moons regularly cast their shadows on the planet throughout its year.

Juno's close proximity to Jupiter provides an exceptional fish-eye view, showing a small fraction near the planet's equator. The shadow is about 2,200 miles (3,600 kilometers) wide, approximately the same width as Io, but appears much larger relative to Jupiter.

A little larger than Earth's Moon, Io is perhaps most famous for its many active volcanoes, often caught lofting fountains of ejecta well above its thin atmosphere.

Citizen scientist Kevin M. Gill created this enhanced-color image using data from the spacecraft's JunoCam imager. The raw image was taken on Sept. 11, 2019 at 8:41 p.m. PDT (11:41 p.m. EDT) as the Juno spacecraft performed its 22nd close flyby of Jupiter. At the time the image was taken, the spacecraft was about 4,885 miles (7,862 kilometers) from the cloud tops at a latitude of 21 degrees.

19/09/2020

Orion in Depth

Orion is a familiar constellation. The apparent positions of its stars in two dimensions create a well-known pattern on the bowl of planet Earth's night sky. Orion may not look quite so familiar in this 3D view though. The illustration reconstructs the relative positions of Orion's bright stars, including data from the Hipparcus catalog of parallax distances. The most distant star shown is Alnilam. The middle one in the projected line of three that make up Orion's belt when viewed from planet Earth, Alnilam is nearly 2,000 light-years away, almost 3 times as far as fellow belt stars Alnitak and Mintaka. Though Rigel and Betelgeuse apparently shine brighter in planet Earth's sky, that makes more distant Alnilam intrinsically (in absolute magnitude) the brightest of the familiar stars in Orion. In the Hipparcus catalog, errors in measured parallaxes for Orion's stars can translate in to distance errors of a 100 light-years or so.

18/09/2020

'Emissions could add 15 inches to 2100 sea level rise, NASA-led study finds' news article from the http://nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/emissions-could-add-15-inches-to-2100-sea-level-rise-nasa-led-study-finds

18/09/2020

Solar Cycle 25 Has Begun

The general trend of monthly sunspot data now confirms that the minimum of the approximately 11 year cycle of solar activity occurred in December 2019, marking the start of Solar Cycle 25. That quiet Sun, at minimum activity, appears on the right of this split hemispherical view. In contrast, the left side shows the active Sun at the recognized maximum of Solar Cycle 24, captured in April 2014. The extreme ultraviolet images from the orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory highlight coronal loops and active regions in the light of highly ionized iron atoms. Driving the space weather around our fair planet, Solar Cycle 24 was a relatively calm one and predictions are that cycle 25 will be calm too. The cycle 25 activity maximum is expected in July 2025. Solar Cycle 1, the first solar cycle determined from early records of sunspot data, is considered to begin with a minimum in February 1755.

17/09/2020

NASA's Aqua satellite captured this true-color image of the United States on Sep. 15, 2020, showing the fires in the West, the smoke from those fires drifting over the country, several hurricanes converging from different angles, and Hurricane Sally making landfall. Red points in the west note areas that are significantly higher in temperature than the areas around it and are indicative of fires. These points are most pronounced up and down the West Coast, but dot the country from coast-to-coast as well. In addition, in this image are captured four hurricanes/tropical storms in both the East and the West. On the left hand side is Karina which is moving away from the Baja California area. Hurricane Sally, seen in the middle of the image, made landfall overnight on the Gulf Coast bringing catastrophic flooding in its wake. Hurricane Paulette sits off the East Coast near Bermuda with winds of 74 mph, although no landmasses are threatened. Hurricane Teddy, in the lower right hand corner is east of the Leeward Islands, also has sustained winds of 74 mph, and is traveling westnorthwest. Satellite images are generated every single day, in fact multiple times from multiple satellites, but it is still very unusual to capture an image of so many hazards in one image.

For more than five decades, NASA has used the vantage point of space to understand and explore our home planet, improve lives and safeguard our future. NASA brings together technology, science, and unique global Earth observations to provide societal benefits and strengthen our nation. Advancing knowledge of our home planet contributes directly to America's leadership in space and scientific exploration.

15/09/2020

Biomarker Phosphine Discovered in the Atmosphere of Venus

Could there be life floating in the atmosphere of Venus? Although Earth's planetary neighbor has a surface considered too extreme for any known lifeform, Venus' upper atmosphere may be sufficiently mild for tiny airborne microbes. This usually disfavored prospect took an unexpected upturn yesterday with the announcement of the discovery of Venusian phosphine. The chemical phosphine (PH3) is a considered a biomarker because it seems so hard to create from routine chemical processes thought to occur on or around a rocky world such as Venus -- but it is known to be created by microbial life on Earth. The featured image of Venus and its thick clouds was taken in two bands of ultraviolet light by the Venus-orbing Akatsuki, a Japanese robotic satellite that has been orbiting the cloud-shrouded world since 2015. The phosphine finding, if confirmed, may set off renewed interest in searching for other indications of life floating high in the atmosphere of our Solar System's second planet out from the Sun.

14/09/2020

Corn Moon Rising

A rising moon can be a dramatic sight. A rising Full Corn Moon was captured early this month in time-lapse with a telephoto lens from nearly 30 kilometers away -- making Earth's ascending half-degree companion appear unusually impressive. The image was captured from Portugal, although much of the foreground -- including lights from the village of Puebla de Guzmán -- is in Spain. A Full Corn Moon is the name attributed to a full moon at this time of year by cultures of some northern indigenous peoples of the Americas, as it coincides with the ripening of corn. Note that the Moon does not appear larger when it is nearer the horizon -- its seemingly larger size there is only an illusion. The next full moon -- occurring at the beginning of next month -- will be known as the Full Harvest Moon as it occurs nearest in time to the northern autumnal equinox and the northern field harvests.

12/09/2020

'Future Rocket Engines May Include Large-Scale 3D Printing' news article from the http://nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/releases/2020/future-rocket-engines-may-include-large-scale-3d-printing.html

11/09/2020

The Reappearance of Mars

Mars reappears just beyond the Moon's dark limb in this stack of sharp video frames captured on September 6. Of course to reappear it had to disappear in the first place. It did that over an hour earlier when the sunlit southern edge of the waning gibbous Moon passed in front of the Red Planet as seen from Maceio, Brazil. The lunar occultation came as the Moon was near apogee, about 400,000 kilometers away. Mars was almost 180 times more distant. It was the fourth lunar occultation of Mars visible from planet Earth in 2020. Visible from some southern latitudes, the fifth lunar occultation of Mars in 2020 will take place on October 3 when the Moon and Mars are both nearly opposite the Sun in planet Earth's sky.

10/09/2020

Jupiter's Swmimming Storm

A bright storm head with a long turbulent wake swims across Jupiter in these sharp telescopic images of the Solar System's ruling gas giant. Captured on August 26, 28, and September 1 (left to right) the storm approximately doubles in length during that period. Stretching along the jetstream of the planet's North Temperate Belt it travels eastward in successive frames, passing the Great Red Spot and whitish Oval BA, famous storms in Jupiter's southern hemisphere. Galilean moons Callisto and Io are caught in the middle frame. In fact, telescopic skygazers following Jupiter in planet Earth's night have reported dramatic fast moving storm outbreaks over the past few weeks in Jupiter's North Temperate Belt.

10/09/2020

'Why Is Asteroid Bennu Ejecting Particles Into Space?' news article from the http://nasa.gov/feature/jpl/why-is-asteroid-bennu-ejecting-particles-into-space

10/09/2020

'Where Rocks Come Alive: NASAs OSIRIS-REx Observes an Asteroid in Action' news article from the http://nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/osiris-rex-observes-an-asteroid-in-action

08/09/2020

Unexpected Black Holes Collide

How do black holes like this form? The two black holes that spiraled together to produce the gravitational wave event GW190521 were not only the most massive black holes ever seen by LIGO and VIRGO so far, their masses -- 66 and 85 solar masses -- were unprecedented and unexpected. Lower mass black holes, below about 65 solar masses are known to form in supernova explosions. Conversely, higher mass black holes, above about 135 solar masses, are thought to be created by very massive stars imploding after they use up their weight-bearing nuclear-fusion-producing elements. How such intermediate mass black holes came to exist is yet unknown, although one hypothesis holds that they result from consecutive collisions of stars and black holes in dense star clusters. Featured is an illustration of the black holes just before collision, annotated with arrows indicating their spin axes. In the illustration, the spiral waves indicate the production of gravitational radiation, while the surrounding stars highlight the possibility that the merger occurred in a star cluster. Seen last year but emanating from an epoch when the universe was only about half its present age (z ~ 0.8), black hole merger GW190521 is the farthest yet detected, to within measurement errors.

04/09/2020

Booster Test for Future Space Launch System Flights

The first solid rocket booster test for Space Launch System (SLS) missions beyond Artemis III seen here during a two-minute hot fire test, Wednesday, September 2, 2020, at the T-97 Northrop Grumman test facility in Promontory, Utah. The flight support booster is structurally identical to each of the five-segment solid rocket boosters on the SLS rocket and produce more than 75 percent of the rocket's thrust capability.

The flight support booster test builds on prior tests and will allow NASA and Northrop Grumman, the SLS booster lead contractor, to evaluate the motor's performance using potential new materials and processes for future booster performance.

NASA is working to land the first woman and next man on the Moon by 2024. The SLS rocket, Orion spacecraft, Gateway, and Human Landing System are part of NASA's backbone for deep space exploration. The Artemis program is the next step in human space exploration. It's part of America's broader Moon to Mars exploration approach, in which astronauts will explore the Moon. Experience gained there will enable humanity's next giant leap: sending humans to Mars. SLS is the only rocket that can send Orion, astronauts and supplies to the Moon in a single mission.

04/09/2020

'NASA Eyes Arrival of New NOAA Weather Satellites First Instrument' news article from the http://nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/NASA-Eyes-Arrival-of-New-NOAA-Weather-Satellites-First-nstrument

03/09/2020

Halo for Andromeda

M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, is the closest large spiral galaxy to our Milky Way. Some 2.5 million light-years distant it shines in Earth's night sky as a small, faint, elongated cloud just visible to the unaided eye. Invisible to the eye though, its enormous halo of hot ionized gas is represented in purplish hues for this digital illustration of our neighboring galaxy above rocky terrain. Mapped by Hubble Space Telescope observations of the absorption of ultraviolet light against distant quasars, the extent and make-up of Andromeda's gaseous halo has been recently determined by the AMIGA project. A reservoir of material for future star formation, Andromeda's halo of diffuse plasma was measured to extend around 1.3 million light-years or more from the galaxy. That's about half way to the Milky Way, likely putting it in contact with the diffuse gaseous halo of our own galaxy.

03/09/2020

Mars's Twin Peaks
NASA's Mars Pathfinder mission landed on the Red Planet on July 4, 1997. It's tiny rover, named Sojourner after abolitionist Sojourner Truth, spent 83 days of a planned seven-day mission exploring the Martian terrain, acquiring images, and taking chemical, atmospheric and other measurements. When the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft approached its destination, no NASA mission had successfully reached Mars in more than 20 years.The final data transmission received from Pathfinder was at 10:23 UTC on September 27, 1997.

This image shows the Twin Peaks, which are modest-size hills to the southwest of the Mars Pathfinder landing site. They were discovered on the first panoramas taken by the IMP camera on the July 4, and subsequently identified in Viking Orbiter images taken more than 20 years before. The peaks are approximately 100 feet tall (30-35 meters). North Twin is approximately 860 meters (2800 feet) from the lander, and South Twin is about a kilometer away (3300 feet). The scene includes bouldery ridges and swales or "hummocks" of flood debris that range from a few tens of meters away from the lander to the distance of the South Twin Peak.

The composite color frames that make up this "right-eye" image consist of 7 frames, taken with different color filters that were enlarged by 500% and then co-added using Adobe Photoshop to produce, in effect, a super-resolution panchromatic frame that is sharper than an individual frame would be. This panchromatic frame was then colorized with the red, green, and blue filtered images from the same sequence. The color balance was adjusted to approximate the true color of Mars.

03/09/2020

NASA Conducts SLS Booster Test for Future Artemis Missions

03/09/2020

'NASA Conducts SLS Booster Test for Future Artemis Missions' news article from the http://nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/nasa-conducts-sls-booster-test-for-future-artemis-missions.html

03/09/2020

NASA and Northrop Grumman successfully complete the Flight Support Booster-1 (FSB-1) test in Promontory, Utah, on Sept. 2. The full-scale booster firing was conducted with new materials and processes that may be used for NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket boosters. NASA and Northrop Grumman, the SLS boosters lead contractor, will use data from the test to evaluate the motor’s performance using potential new materials and processes for Artemis missions beyond the initial Moon landing in 2024.The SLS boosters are the largest, most powerful boosters ever built for flight. The two boosters on the rocket provide more than 75% of the thrust needed to launch NASA’s future deep space missions through NASA’s Artemis lunar program. Northrop Grumman is the lead contractor for the SLS boosters.

02/09/2020

'NASA Invites Media to Northrop Grummans September Antares Launch from Virginia' news article from the http://nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-invites-media-to-northrop-grumman-s-september-antares-launch-from-virginia

02/09/2020

'From Space and in the Air, NASA Tracks California's Wildfires' news article from the http://nasa.gov/feature/jpl/from-space-and-in-the-air-nasa-tracks-californias-wildfires

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