Cygnus Entering The Atmosphere, Photographed By Alexander Gerst On The ISS.

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You don’t know what goes on behind closed doors. 

I can’t believe Mars has more water than California.

NASA: 2016 Look Ahead

The work we do, and will continue in 2016, helps the United States maintain its world leadership in space exploration and scientific discovery. Here’s an overview of what we have planned for the coming year:

Our Journey to Mars

We’re developing the capabilities needed to send humans to an asteroid by 2025 and Mars in the 2030s. Mars is a rich destination for scientific discovery and robotic and human exploration as we expand our presence into the solar system. Its formation and evolution are comparable to Earth, helping us learn more about our own planet’s history and future.

Work and Research on the International Space Station

The International Space Station is a unique place – a convergence of science, technology and human innovation that demonstrates new technologies and makes research breakthroughs not possible on Earth. In 2016, we will continue our groundbreaking research on the orbiting laboratory.

Returning Human Spaceflight Launches to American Soil

Our Commercial Crew Program is working with the American aerospace industry as companies develop and operate a new generation of spacecraft and launch systems capable of carrying crews to low-Earth orbit and the International Space Station. Commercial transportation to and from the station will provide expanded utility, additional research time and broader opportunities of discovery on the orbiting laboratory.

Studying Our Earth Right Now

We use the vantage point of space to increase our understanding of our home planet, improve lives and safeguard our future. In 2016, we will continue to monitor Earth’s vital signs from land, air and space with a fleet of satellites and ambitious airborne and ground-based observation campaigns.

Fostering Groundbreaking Technology Development

Sustained investments in NASA technology advances our space exploration, science and aeronautics capabilities. Our technology development also supports the nation’s innovation economy by creating solutions that generate tangible benefits for life on earth. In 2016, we will continue to invest in the future of innovation.

Breakthroughs in Aeronautics

Thanks to our advancements in aeronautics, today’s aviation industry is better equipped than ever to safely and efficiently transport all those passengers to their destinations. In fact, every U.S. aircraft flying today and every U.S. air traffic control tower uses NASA-developed technology in some way. In 2016, we will continue making these breakthroughs in aeronautics.

Discoveries in Our Solar System and Beyond

This year we will continue exploring our solar system and beyond to unravel the mysteries of our universe. We are looking to answer key questions about our home planet, neighboring planets in our solar system and more!

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

Ten Awe-Inspiring Photos

We’ve taken 10 of our top Instagram posts and put them here for your viewing pleasure. Now, your next 10 cell phone backgrounds can be found in one place.

10. Water on Mars

With 210,000 likes, this image is a favorite on Instagram. New findings from our Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) provide the strongest evidence yet that liquid water flows intermittently on present-day Mars. Dark, narrow streaks on Martian slopes such as these at Hale Crater are inferred to be formed by seasonal flow of water on contemporary Mars. The streaks are roughly the length of a football field.

9. Smoke Ring for a Halo

With 210,000 likes, this image shined on Instagram. Two stars shine through the center of a ring of cascading dust in this image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The star system is named DI Cha, and while only two stars are apparent, it is actually a quadruple system containing two sets of binary stars. As this is a relatively young star system it is surrounded by dust.

8. Pluto’s Largest Moon, Charon

With 216,000 likes, a lot of people thought this image was interesting on Instagram. Our New Horizons spacecraft has returned the best color and the highest resolution images yet of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon - and these pictures show a surprisingly complex and violent history. This high-resolution enhanced color view of Charon was captured just before closest approach on July 14. The image combines blue, red and infrared images; the colors are processed to best highlight the variation of surface properties across Charon.

7. Veil Nebula

With 220,000 likes, many people favorited this image  on Instagram. This is the expanding remains of a massive star that exploded about 8,000 years ago. This view is a mosaic of six pictures from our Hubble Space Telescope of a small area roughly two light-years across, covering only a tiny fraction of the nebula’s vast structure. This close-up look unveils wisps of gas, which are all that remain of what was once a star 20 times more massive than our sun.

6. Messier 94 Galaxy

With 234,000 likes, this image is a favorite on Instagram. This image shows the galaxy Messier 94, which lies in the small northern constellation of the Hunting Dogs, about 16 million light-years away. Within the bright ring or starburst ring around Messier 94, new stars are forming at a high rate and many young, bright stars are present within it.

5. Solar ‘Pumpkin’

With 247,000 likes, many followers enjoyed this image on Instagram. This photo was posted on Halloween and shows active regions on the sun combined to look something like a jack-o-lantern’s face. The image was captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory in October 2014, which watches the sun at all times from its orbit in space.

4. Italy from the International Space Station

With 251,000 likes, this image captivated many of you on Instagram. Before drifting off to sleep, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly (@stationcdrkelly) captured this images from the International Space Station and wrote, “ Day 180. Moonlight over Italy. #BuonaNotte Good night from @ISS! #YearInSpace.”

3. Cosmic Archaeological Dig

With 286,000 likes, this image dazzled many of you on Instagram. Peering deep into the Milky Way’s crowded central hub of stars, researchers using our Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered for the first time a population of ancient white dwarfs – smoldering remnants of once-vibrant stars that inhabited the core. Finding these relics at last can yield clues to how our galaxy was built, long before Earth and our sun formed. This image is a small section of Hubble’s view of the dense collection of stars crammed together in the galactic bulge.

2. Super Blood Moon

With 310,000 likes, this image was very popular on Instagram. It shows the Super Blood Moon behind the Washington Monument on Sunday, Sept. 27, in Washington, DC. The combination of a supermoon and total lunar eclipse last occurred in 1982 and will not happen again until 2033.

1. Pluto

With 363,000 likes, this image is one of our most popular pictures on Instagram. The dwarf planet sent a love note back to Earth via our New Horizons spacecraft, which traveled more than 9 years and 3+ billion miles. This was the last and most detailed image of Pluto sent to Earth before the moment of closest approach, which was at 7:49 a.m. EDT Tuesday, July 14 - about 7,750 miles above the surface – roughly the same distance from New York to Mumbai, India - making it the first-ever space mission to explore a world so far from Earth.

For more pictures like these, follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nasa/ 

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

Top 10 Ways the Space Station is Helping Get Us to Mars

Believe it or not, the International Space Station is paving our way to Mars. Being the only microgravity laboratory in which long-duration investigations can take place, it provides deeper understanding of how the human body reacts to long-term spaceflight. Here are the top 10 ways the space station is helping us on our journey to the Red Planet:

10: Communication Delays

Have you ever sent a text and got frustrated when it took longer than 3 seconds to send? Imaging communicating from Mars where round-trip delays could take up to 31 minutes! Our Comm Delay Assessment studies the effects of delayed communications for interplanetary crews that have to handle medical and other emergencies in deep space.

9. Astronaut Functional Performance

After a long nights sleep, do you ever feel a bit clumsy when you first get out of bed? Imagine how crew members might feel after spending six months to a year in microgravity! Our Field Test investigation is working to understand the extend of physical changes in astronauts who live in space for long periods of time, with an aim toward improving recovery time and developing injury prevention methods for future missions.

8. Psychological Impacts of Isolation and Confinement

In order to study the behavioral issues associated with isolation and confinement, researchers evaluate the personal journals of space station crew members. These study results provide information to help prepare us for longer duration spaceflight.

7. Impacts on Vision

Did you know that long duration spaceflight can often cause changes to crew members’ vision? It can, and our Ocular Health study monitors microgravity-induced visual impairment, as well as changes believed to arise from elevated intracranial pressure. All of this work hopes to characterize how living in microgravity can affect the visual, vascular and central nervous systems.

6. Immune Responses

An important aspect of our journey to Mars is the need to understand how long-duration spaceflight affects they way crew members’ bodies defend agains pathogens. Our Integrated Immune investigation collects and analyzes blood, urine and saliva samples from crew members before, during and after spaceflight to monitor changes in the immune system.

5. Food for Long-Duration Crews

Just like a hiker preparing for a long trek, packing the foods that will give you the most energy for the longest amount of time is key to your success. This is also true for astronauts on long-duration missions. Our Energy investigation measures a crew members’ energy requirements, which is a crucial factor needed for sending the correct amount of the right types of food to space.

4. Exercise for Long-Term Missions

Rigorous exercise is already a regular part of astronauts’ routines, and continuing that focus will be critical to keeping crew members’ bodies strong and ready for a mission to Mars and a healthy return to Earth. Our Sprint investigation is studying the best combination of intensity and duration for exercise in space.

3. Determine Best Habitat/Environment for Crews

Have you ever complained about your room being too small? Imagine living in cramped quarters with an entire crew for months on a Mars mission! Our Habitability investigation collects observations that will help spacecraft designers understand how much habitable volume is required, and whether a mission’s duration impacts how much space crew members need.

2. Growing Food in Space

There’s nothing like fresh food. Not only does it provide valuable nutrition for astronauts, but can also offer psychological benefits from tending and harvesting the crops. Our Veggie investigation studies how to best utilize a facility aboard the space station for growing fresh produce in microgravity.

1. Manufacturing Items in Space

When crews head to Mars, there may be items that are unanticipated or that break during the mission. Our 3-D Printing in Zero-G Technology Demonstration would give crews the ability to manufacture new objects on demand while in space.

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

The Solar System

What’s Enceladus?

Before we tell you about Enceladus, let’s first talk about our Cassini spacecraft…

Our Cassini mission to Saturn is one of the most ambitious efforts in planetary space exploration ever mounted. Cassini is a sophisticated robotic spacecraft orbiting the ringed planet and studying the Saturnian system in detail.

Cassini completed its initial four-year mission to explore the Saturn System in June 2008. It has also completed its first mission extension in September 2010. Now, the health spacecraft is making exciting new discoveries in a second extension mission!

Enceladus

Enceladus is one of Saturn’s many moons, and is one of the brightest objects in our solar system. This moon is about as wide as Arizona, and displays at least five different types of terrain. The surface is believed to be geologically “young”, possibly less than 100 million years old.

Cassini first discovered continually-erupting fountains of icy material on Enceladus in 2005. Since then, the Saturn moon has become one of the most promising places in the solar system to search for present-day habitable environments.  

Scientists found that hydrothermal activity may be occurring on the seafloor of the moon’s underground ocean. In September, it was announced that its ocean –previously thought to only be a regional sea – was global!

Since Cassini is nearing the end of its mission, we are able to make a series of three close encounters with Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons.

Close Encounters

On Oct. 14, Cassini performed a mid-range flyby of Enceladus, but the main event will take place on Oct. 28, when Cassini will come dizzyingly close to the icy moon. During this flyby, the spacecraft will pass a mere 30 miles above the moon’s south polar region!

This will be the deepest-ever dive through the moon’s plume of icy spray, where Cassini can collect images and valuable data about what’s going on beneath the frozen surface.

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

Astronomers have found compelling signs for a supermassive black hole in the center of almost every large galaxy they have scrutinized, and the Milky Way is no exception. The core of our galaxy harbors an object called Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star) — a black hole with about 4 million times the Sun’s mass. It’s the 19th confirmed black hole in the Milky Way, and it sits dead in the center.

The evidence takes several forms. First, intense radio waves and X-rays flow from an accretion disk that spans a region no bigger than our solar system. But the proof comes from careful tracking of the motions of stars as they orbit the central mass. It’s the same method astronomers use to hunt for globular cluster black holes, but the huge size of the object in the Milky Way’s heart makes these motions far easier to see. Analyzing the stellar orbits leads directly to the black hole’s mass.

The count of black holes in our galaxy likely will continue to grow in the years ahead, but it never will outpace the flood of planet discoveries. The ability to find planets has reached the stage where it’s surprising when a week goes by without a new detection. Black holes hide their identities much better, either behind the cloak of an event horizon or in isolation from other objects. Perhaps the biggest surprise in the study of our galaxy’s black holes is that we’ve already found 19.

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