GOES-R: The Future Of Forecasting

Tumblr, this is Houston speaking! The flight directors Answer Time with Chloe Mehring and Diane Dailey is live. Stay tuned to learn about what happens in mission control, how to become a flight director, and what Hollywood sometimes gets wrong about the job. View ALL the answers HERE.

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Get Ready Stargazers: The Geminids Are Here!

The Geminid meteor shower, one of the biggest meteor showers of the year, will peak this weekend, December 13 to 14. We get a lot of questions about the Geminids—so we’ve put together some answers to the ones we’re most commonly asked. Take a look!  

What are the Geminids?

The Geminids are pieces of debris from an asteroid called 3200 Phaethon. Earth runs into Phaethon’s debris stream every year in mid-December, causing meteors to fly from the direction of the constellation Gemini – hence the name “Geminids.”  

Image Credit: Arecibo Observatory/NASA/NSF

When is the best time to view them?

This year, the peak is during the overnight hours of December 13 and into the morning of December 14. Viewing should still be good on the night of December 14 into the early morning hours of the 15th. Weather permitting, the Geminids can be viewed from around midnight to 4 a.m. local time. The best time to see them is around 2 a.m. your local time on December 14, when the Geminid radiant is highest in your night sky. The higher the radiant – the celestial point in the sky from which meteors appear to originate – rises into the sky, the more meteors you are likely to see.

Image Credit & Copyright: Jeff Dai

What is the best way to see them?

Find the darkest place you can and give your eyes about 30 minutes to adapt to the dark. Avoid looking at your cell phone, as it will disrupt your night vision. Lie flat on your back and look straight up, taking in as much sky as possible. You will soon start to see the Geminid meteors!

Image Credit: NASA/Bill Dunford

Can you see the Geminids from anywhere in the world?

The Geminids are best observed in the Northern Hemisphere, but no matter where you are in the world (except Antarctica), some Geminids will be visible.

Image Credit: Jimmy Westlake

How many Geminids can I expect to see?

Under dark, clear skies, the Geminids can produce up to 120 meteors per hour – but this year, a bright, nearly full moon will hinder observations of the shower. Still, observers can hope to see up to 30 meteors per hour. Happy viewing!  

Image Credit & Copyright: Yuri Beletsky

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Solar System: Things To Know This Week

Weather permitting, you can observe the Moon most nights, unless it's a new moon, when the lighted side of the Moon faces away from Earth. The Moon is by far the brightest object in the night sky and there's plenty to see. But this week is special...

...October 28 is International Observe the Moon Night (also known as InOMN).

Here's all you need to know to join in and celebrate:

1. One Planet. One Moon. One Night.

Everyone on Earth is invited to join the celebration by hosting or attending an InOMN event and uniting on one day each year to look at and learn about the Moon together.

2. What's Up?

October's night skies are full of sights, from the first quarter Moon on InOMN to Saturn making a cameo appearance above the Moon October 23 and 24. Watch our What's Up video for details.

3. Be Social

Hundreds of events are planned around the globe. Click the top link on this page for a handy map. You can also register your own event.

4. Don't Just Stand There

Here are some activities for enhanced Moon watching.

5. Impress Your Friends with Moon Knowledge

Download InOMN flyers and handouts, Moon maps and even some pre-made presentations. There's even a certificate to mark your participation.

6. Guide to the Face of the Moon

Almost dead center on the Earth-facing side of the Moon is the Surveyor 6 robotic spacecraft impact side. Apollo 12 and 14 are a bit to the left. And Apollo 11 - the first steps on the moon - are to the right. This retro graphic tells the whole story.

7. Moon Shots

NASA photographers have done some exceptional work capturing views of the Moon from Earth. Here are a few galleries:

You can't have a solar eclipse without the Moon.

The 2016 "Supermoon" was pretty spectacular.

The Moon gets eclipsed, too.

That IS a Moon - AND the International Space Station.

The Moon is always a great photo subject.

Some spooky shots of the 2014 "Supermoon."

And 2013.

Tips from a NASA pro for photographing the Moon.

8. Walking on the Moon

Twelve human beings walked on the face of the Moon. Here are some of the best shots from the Apollo program.

9. Moon Watch

Our Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is up there right now, mapping the moon and capturing some spectacular high-resolution shots.

10. Keep Exploring

Make our Moon portal your base for further lunar exploration.

Check out the full version of ‘Ten Things to Know This Week’ HERE.

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So Close, So Far: See Juno’s first orbit of Jupiter in this amateur-created JunoCam “marble movie.” 

Credit: NASA/JPL/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt

July 20, 1969: People around the world tune their radios and television sets to watch humans step foot on the Moon for the first time.

Gather ‘round with us today and experience history as it unfolded 50 years ago.

Watch NASA TV at 4:02 p.m. EDT as we replay the original live broadcast of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. 

Then, at 10:38 p.m. EDT, watch the replay of the original live broadcast of the first steps on the Moon, as the world watched it in 1969: 

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In temperatures that drop below -20 degrees Fahrenheit, along a route occasionally blocked by wind-driven ice dunes, a hundred miles from any other people, a team led by two of our scientists are surveying an unexplored stretch of Antarctic ice. 

They’ve packed extreme cold-weather gear and scientific instruments onto sleds pulled by two tank-like snow machines called PistenBullys, and after a stop at the South Pole Station (seen in this image), they began a two- to three-week traverse.

The 470-mile expedition in one of the most barren landscapes on Earth will ultimately provide the best assessment of the accuracy of data collected from space by the Ice Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2), set to launch in 2018.

This traverse provides an extremely challenging way to assess the accuracy of the data. ICESat-2’s datasets are going to tell us incredible things about how Earth’s ice is changing, and what that means for things like sea level rise.

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Diving into New Magnetic Territory with the MMS Mission

Our Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission, or MMS, is on a journey to study a new region of space.  

On May 4, 2017, after three months of precisely coordinated maneuvers, MMS reached its new orbit to begin studying the magnetic environment on the ever-rotating nighttime side of Earth.

The space around Earth is not as empty as it looks. It’s packed with high energy electrons and ions that zoom along magnetic field lines and surf along waves created by electric and magnetic fields.  

MMS studies how these particles move in order to understand a process known as magnetic reconnection, which occurs when magnetic fields explosively collide and re-align.

After launch, MMS started exploring the magnetic environment on the side of Earth closest to the sun. Now, MMS has been boosted into a new orbit that tops out twice as high as before, at over 98,000 miles above Earth’s surface.

The new orbit will allow the spacecraft to study magnetic reconnection on the night side of Earth, where the process is thought to cause the northern and southern lights and energize particles that fill the radiation belts, a doughnut-shaped region of trapped particles surrounding Earth.  

MMS uses four separate but identical spacecraft, which fly in a tight pyramid formation known as a tetrahedron. This allows MMS to map the magnetic environment in three dimensions.

MMS made many discoveries during its first two years in space, and its new orbit will open the door to even more. The information scientists get from MMS will help us better understand our space environment, which helps in planning future missions to explore even further beyond our planet. Learn more about MMS at nasa.gov/mms.

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We Just Identified More Than 200 New (Potential) Planets

The Kepler space telescope is our first mission capable of identifying Earth-size planets around other stars. On Monday, June 19, 2017, scientists from many countries gathered at our Ames Research Center to talk about the latest results from the spacecraft, which include the identification of more than 200 potential new worlds! Here’s what you need to know:

We found 219 new planet candidates.

All of these worlds were found in a patch of sky near the Cygnus constellation in our Milky Way galaxy. Between 2009 and 2013, Kepler searched more than 200,000 stars in the region for orbiting planets. The 219 new planet candidates are part of the more than 4,000 planet candidates and 2,300 confirmed planets Kepler has identified to date.

Ten of these worlds are like our own.

Out of the 219 new planet candidates, 10 are possibly rocky, terrestrial worlds and orbit their star in the habitable zone – the range of distances from a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of a rocky planet.

Small planets come in two sizes.

Kepler has opened up our eyes to the existence of many small worlds. It turns out a lot of these planets are either approximately 1.5 times the size of Earth or just smaller than Neptune. The cool names given to planets of these sizes? Super Earths and mini-Neptunes.

Some of the new planets could be habitable. 

Water is a key ingredient to life as we know it. Many of the new planet candidates are likely to have small rocky cores enveloped by a thick atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, and some are thought to be ocean worlds. That doesn’t necessarily mean the oceans of these planets are full of water, but we can dream, can’t we?

Other Earths are out there.

Kepler’s survey has made it possible for us to measure the number of Earth-size habitable zone planets in our galaxy. Determining how many planets like our own that exist is the big question we’ll explore next.

The hunt for new planets continues.

Kepler continues to search for planets in different regions of space. With the launch of our Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in 2018, we’re going to search for planets nearest the sun and measure the composition of their atmospheres. In the mid-2020s, we have our sights on taking a picture of small planets like Earth with our Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST).

*All images of planets are artist illustrations.

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Astronomers used three of NASA's Great Observatories to capture this multiwavelength image showing galaxy cluster IDCS J1426.5+3508. It includes X-rays recorded by the Chandra X-ray Observatory in blue, visible light observed by the Hubble Space Telescope in green, and infrared light from the Spitzer Space Telescope in red. This rare galaxy cluster has important implications for understanding how these megastructures formed and evolved early in the universe.

How Astronomers Time Travel

Let’s add another item to your travel bucket list: the early universe! You don’t need the type of time machine you see in sci-fi movies, and you don’t have to worry about getting trapped in the past. You don’t even need to leave the comfort of your home! All you need is a powerful space-based telescope.

But let’s start small and work our way up to the farthest reaches of space. We’ll explain how it all works along the way.

This animation illustrates how fast light travels between Earth and the Moon. The farther light has to travel, the more noticeable its speed limit becomes.

The speed of light is superfast, but it isn’t infinite. It travels at about 186,000 miles (300 million meters) per second. That means that it takes time for the light from any object to reach our eyes. The farther it is, the more time it takes.

You can see nearby things basically in real time because the light travel time isn’t long enough to make a difference. Even if an object is 100 miles (161 kilometers) away, it takes just 0.0005 seconds for light to travel that far. But on astronomical scales, the effects become noticeable.

This infographic shows how long it takes light to travel to different planets in our solar system.

Within our solar system, light’s speed limit means it can take a while to communicate back and forth between spacecraft and ground stations on Earth. We see the Moon, Sun, and planets as they were slightly in the past, but it's not usually far enough back to be scientifically interesting.

As we peer farther out into our galaxy, we use light-years to talk about distances. Smaller units like miles or kilometers would be too overwhelming and we’d lose a sense of their meaning. One light-year – the distance light travels in a year – is nearly 6 trillion miles (9.5 trillion kilometers). And that’s just a tiny baby step into the cosmos.

The Sun’s closest neighboring star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light-years away. That means we see it as it was about four years ago. Betelgeuse, a more distant (and more volatile) stellar neighbor, is around 700 light-years away. Because of light’s lag time, astronomers don’t know for sure whether this supergiant star is still there! It may have already blasted itself apart in a supernova explosion – but it probably has another 10,000 years or more to go.

What looks much like craggy mountains on a moonlit evening is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals previously obscured areas of star birth.

The Carina Nebula clocks in at 7,500 light-years away, which means the light we receive from it today began its journey about 3,000 years before the pyramids of Giza in Egypt were built! Many new stars there have undoubtedly been born by now, but their light may not reach Earth for thousands of years.

An artist’s concept of our Milky Way galaxy, with rough locations for the Sun and Carina nebula marked.

If we zoom way out, you can see that 7,500 light-years away is still pretty much within our neighborhood. Let’s look further back in time…

This stunning image by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features the spiral galaxy NGC 5643. Looking this good isn’t easy; 30 different exposures, for a total of nine hours of observation time, together with Hubble’s high resolution and clarity, were needed to produce an image of such exquisite detail and beauty.

Peering outside our Milky Way galaxy transports us much further into the past. The Andromeda galaxy, our nearest large galactic neighbor, is about 2.5 million light-years away. And that’s still pretty close, as far as the universe goes. The image above shows the spiral galaxy NGC 5643, which is about 60 million light-years away! That means we see it as it was about 60 million years ago.

As telescopes look deeper into the universe, they capture snapshots in time from different cosmic eras. Astronomers can stitch those snapshots together to unravel things like galaxy evolution. The closest ones are more mature; we see them nearly as they truly are in the present day because their light doesn’t have to travel as far to reach us. We can’t rewind those galaxies (or our own), but we can get clues about how they likely developed. Looking at galaxies that are farther and farther away means seeing these star cities in ever earlier stages of development.

The farthest galaxies we can see are both old and young. They’re billions of years old now, and the light we receive from them is ancient since it took so long to traverse the cosmos. But since their light was emitted when the galaxies were young, it gives us a view of their infancy.

This animation is an artist’s concept of the big bang, with representations of the early universe and its expansion.

Comparing how fast objects at different distances are moving away opened up the biggest mystery in modern astronomy: cosmic acceleration. The universe was already expanding as a result of the big bang, but astronomers expected it to slow down over time. Instead, it’s speeding up!

The universe’s expansion makes it tricky to talk about the distances of the farthest objects. We often use lookback time, which is the amount of time it took for an object’s light to reach us. That’s simpler than using a literal distance, because an object that was 10 billion light-years away when it emitted the light we received from it would actually be more than 16 billion light-years away right now, due to the expansion of space. We can even see objects that are presently over 30 billion light-years from Earth, even though the universe is only about 14 billion years old.

This James Webb Space Telescope image shines with the light from galaxies that are more than 13.4 billion years old, dating back to less than 400 million years after the big bang.

Our James Webb Space Telescope has helped us time travel back more than 13.4 billion years, to when the universe was less than 400 million years old. When our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches in a few years, astronomers will pair its vast view of space with Webb’s zooming capabilities to study the early universe in better ways than ever before. And don’t worry – these telescopes will make plenty of pit stops along the way at other exciting cosmic destinations across space and time.

Learn more about the exciting science Roman will investigate on X and Facebook.

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What’s your favorite geological feature to view from space? Alternatively, what’s the biggest “duh” moment you’ve had during your career where you had an incorrect, preconceived notion about something. Thanks!