Other “ Solar Systems ”. The Milky Way Has An Average Of 200 To 400 Billion Stars, Not All Stars

É um evento único, que ficará em nossas memórias.

📅 Data de registro: 5 de agosto de 2024 às 18:24

Reinventing the Wheel

Planning a trip to the Moon? Mars? You’re going to need good tires…

Exploration requires mobility. And whether you’re on Earth or as far away as the Moon or Mars, you need good tires to get your vehicle from one place to another. Our decades-long work developing tires for space exploration has led to new game-changing designs and materials. Yes, we’re reinventing the wheel—here’s why.

Wheels on the Moon

Early tire designs were focused on moving hardware and astronauts across the lunar surface. The last NASA vehicle to visit the Moon was the Lunar Roving Vehicle during our Apollo missions. The vehicle used four large flexible wire mesh wheels with stiff inner frames. We used these Apollo era tires as the inspiration for new designs using newer materials and technology to better function on a lunar surface.

Up springs a new idea

During the mid-2000s, we worked with industry partner Goodyear to develop the Spring Tire, an airless compliant tire that consists of several hundred coiled steel wires woven into a flexible mesh, giving the tires the ability to support high loads while also conforming to the terrain. The Spring Tire has been proven to generate very good traction and durability in soft sand and on rocks.

Spring Tires for Mars

A little over a year after the Mars Curiosity Rover landed on Mars, engineers began to notice significant wheel damage in 2013 due to the unexpectedly harsh terrain. That’s when engineers began developing new Spring Tire prototypes to determine if they would be a new and better solution for exploration rovers on Mars.

In order for Spring Tires to go the distance on Martian terrain, new materials were required. Enter nickel titanium, a shape memory alloy with amazing capabilities that allow the tire to deform down to the axle and return to its original shape.

These tires can take a lickin’

After building the shape memory alloy tire, Glenn engineers sent it to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Mars Life Test Facility. It performed impressively on the punishing track.

Why reinvent the wheel? It’s worth it.

New, high performing tires would allow lunar and Mars rovers to explore greater regions of the surface than currently possible. They conform to the terrain and do not sink as much as rigid wheels, allowing them to carry heavier payloads for the same given mass and volume. Also, because they absorb energy from impacts at moderate to high speeds, there is potential for use on crewed exploration vehicles which are expected to move at speeds significantly higher than the current Mars rovers.

Airless tires on Earth

Maybe. Recently, engineers and materials scientists have been testing a spinoff tire version that would work on cars and trucks on Earth. Stay tuned as we continue to push the boundaries on traditional concepts for exploring our world and beyond.  

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.  

Não é alinhamento e nem é tão raro assim, vai se repetir em Outubro de 2018, mas não deixa de ser um bom motivo para olhar para cima ao entardecer e observar 5 planetas a olho nu.

C de Caprichoso, C de Campeão! 🏆

Aglomerados de Galáxias Revelam Novas Ideias Sobre a Matéria Escura - http://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/galaxy-clusters-reveal-new-dark-matter-insights (será que vale um vídeo? )

Solar System: 10 Things to Know This Week

January 8: Images for Your Computer or Phone Wallpaper

Need some fresh perspective? Here are 10 vision-stretching images for your computer desktop or phone wallpaper. These are all real pictures, sent recently by our planetary missions throughout the solar system. You’ll find more of our images at solarsystem.nasa.gov/galleries, images.nasa.gov and www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages.

Applying Wallpaper: 1. Click on the screen resolution you would like to use. 2. Right-click on the image (control-click on a Mac) and select the option ‘Set the Background’ or 'Set as Wallpaper’ (or similar).

1. The Fault in Our Mars

This image from our Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) of northern Meridiani Planum shows faults that have disrupted layered deposits. Some of the faults produced a clean break along the layers, displacing and offsetting individual beds.

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2. Jupiter Blues

Our Juno spacecraft captured this image when the spacecraft was only 11,747 miles (18,906 kilometers) from the tops of Jupiter’s clouds – that’s roughly as far as the distance between New York City and Perth, Australia. The color-enhanced image, which captures a cloud system in Jupiter’s northern hemisphere, was taken on Oct. 24, 2017, when Juno was at a latitude of 57.57 degrees (nearly three-fifths of the way from Jupiter’s equator to its north pole) and performing its ninth close flyby of the gas giant planet.

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3. A Farewell to Saturn

After more than 13 years at Saturn, and with its fate sealed, our Cassini spacecraft bid farewell to the Saturnian system by firing the shutters of its wide-angle camera and capturing this last, full mosaic of Saturn and its rings two days before the spacecraft’s dramatic plunge into the planet’s atmosphere on Sept. 15, 2017.

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4. All Aglow

Saturn’s moon Enceladus drifts before the rings, which glow brightly in the sunlight. Beneath its icy exterior shell, Enceladus hides a global ocean of liquid water. Just visible at the moon’s south pole (at bottom here) is the plume of water ice particles and other material that constantly spews from that ocean via fractures in the ice. The bright speck to the right of Enceladus is a distant star. This image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 6, 2011.

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5. Rare Encircling Filament

Our Solar Dynamics Observatory came across an oddity this week that the spacecraft has rarely observed before: a dark filament encircling an active region (Oct. 29-31, 2017). Solar filaments are clouds of charged particles that float above the Sun, tethered to it by magnetic forces. They are usually elongated and uneven strands. Only a handful of times before have we seen one shaped like a circle. (The black area to the left of the brighter active region is a coronal hole, a magnetically open region of the Sun).

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6. Jupiter’s Stunning Southern Hemisphere

See Jupiter’s southern hemisphere in beautiful detail in this image taken by our Juno spacecraft. The color-enhanced view captures one of the white ovals in the “String of Pearls,” one of eight massive rotating storms at 40 degrees south latitude on the gas giant planet. The image was taken on Oct. 24, 2017, as Juno performed its ninth close flyby of Jupiter. At the time the image was taken, the spacecraft was 20,577 miles (33,115 kilometers) from the tops of the clouds of the planet.

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7. Saturn’s Rings: View from Beneath

Our Cassini spacecraft obtained this panoramic view of Saturn’s rings on Sept. 9, 2017, just minutes after it passed through the ring plane. The view looks upward at the southern face of the rings from a vantage point above Saturn’s southern hemisphere.

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8. From Hot to Hottest

This sequence of images from our Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the Sun from its surface to its upper atmosphere all taken at about the same time (Oct. 27, 2017). The first shows the surface of the sun in filtered white light; the other seven images were taken in different wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light. Note that each wavelength reveals somewhat different features. They are shown in order of temperature, from the first one at about 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit (6,000 degrees Celsius) on the surface, out to about 10 million degrees in the upper atmosphere. Yes, the sun’s outer atmosphere is much, much hotter than the surface. Scientists are getting closer to solving the processes that generate this phenomenon.

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9. High Resolution View of Ceres

This orthographic projection shows dwarf planet Ceres as seen by our Dawn spacecraft. The projection is centered on Occator Crater, home to the brightest area on Ceres. Occator is centered at 20 degrees north latitude, 239 degrees east longitude.

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10. In the Chasm

This image from our Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows a small portion of the floor of Coprates Chasma, a large trough within the Valles Marineris system of canyons. Although the exact sequence of events that formed Coprates Chasma is unknown, the ripples, mesas, and craters visible throughout the terrain point to a complex history involving multiple mechanisms of erosion and deposition. The main trough of Coprates Chasma ranges from 37 miles (60 kilometers) to 62 miles (100 kilometers) in width.

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Explore and learn more about our solar system at: solarsystem.nasa.gov/. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

The latest results from the “Cheshire Cat” group of galaxies show how manifestations of Einstein’s 100-year-old theory can lead to new discoveries today. Astronomers have given the group this name because of the smiling cat-like appearance. Some of the feline features are actually distant galaxies whose light has been stretched and bent by the large amounts of mass, most of which is in the form of dark matter detectable only through its gravitational effect, found in the system. 

Image credit: NASA / STScI / Chandra & Hubble

A fotografia desta semana mostra fitas de gás e poeira em torno do centro da galáxia espiral barrada NGC 1398. Esta galáxia situa-se na constelação da Fornalha, a aproximadamente 65 milhões de anos-luz de distância da Terra.

Em vez de começarem no meio da galáxia e espiralarem para o exterior, os braços em espiral da NGC 1398 têm origem numa barra direita, formada de estrelas, que corta a região central da galáxia. Uma grande parte das galáxias em espiral — cerca de dois terços — apresenta esta estrutura, no entanto ainda não é claro se e como é que estas barras afectam o comportamento e o desenvolvimento das suas galáxias.

Esta imagem foi criada a partir de dados obtidos pelo instrumento FORS2 (FOcal Reducer/low dispersion Spectrograph 2), montado no Very Large Telescope do ESO (VLT) no Observatório do Paranal, no Chile, e mostra a NGC 1398 em grande detalhe, dos escuros trilhos de poeira que sarapintam os braços em espiral às regiões de formação estelar em tons rosa que aparecem nas regiões mais externas.

A imagem foi criada no âmbito do programa Jóias Cósmicas do ESO, o qual visa obter imagens de objetos interessantes, intrigantes ou visualmente atrativos, utilizando os telescópios do ESO, para efeitos de educação e divulgação científica. O programa utiliza tempo de telescópio que não pode ser usado em observações científicas. Todos os dados obtidos podem ter igualmente interesse científico e são por isso postos à disposição dos astrónomos através do arquivo científico do ESO. Crédito da Imagem: ESO

Neste momento começo a assistir a primeira temporada da série @theexpanse.

O que essa série tem a nos mostrar sobre o possível futuro de colonização de outros planetas?!