New Glovebox Facility Heads To Space For Biological Research

What’s Up November 2017

What’s Up For November?

Dawn pairing of Jupiter and Venus, Moon shines near star clusters, meteor activity all month long!

This month binoculars will come in handy--to view the moon, star clusters, and a close pairing of Venus and Jupiter.

You can’t miss bright Venus in the predawn sky. This month Venus pairs up with Jupiter on the morning of November 13th.

The Leonids peak on a moonless November 17th. Expect no more than 10 meteors an hour around 3:00 a.m., the height of the shower.

The Northern and Southern sub-branches of the Taurid meteor shower offer sparse counts of about 5 meteors per hour, but slow, bright meteors are common.

The nearby November Orionids peak on the 28th. In contrast to the Taurids, the Orionids are swift. But don’t expect more than 3 meteors per hour.

The moon glides by three beautiful star clusters in the morning sky this month, and a pair of binoculars will allow you to see the individual stars in the clusters. Aim your binoculars at the Pleiades and the moon on the 5th.

Then aim at the Messier or M-35 cluster and the moon on the 7th and the Beehive cluster and the moon on the 10th.

Meanwhile, at dusk, catch Saturn as it dips closer to the western horizon and pairs up with Mercury on the 24th through the 28th.

Also, Comet C/2017 O1 should still be a binocular-friendly magnitude 7 or 8 greenish object in November. Use Polaris, the North Star as a guide. Look in the East to Northeast sky in the late evening.  

Watch the full What’s Up for November Video: 

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

Seven Years of Tracking the Solar Cycle

Our sun is ever-changing, and a satellite called the Solar Dynamics Observatory has a front-row seat. 

On February 11, 2010, we launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory, also known as SDO. SDO keeps a constant eye on the sun, helping us track everything from sunspots to solar flares to other types of space weather that can have an impact on Earth.

After seven years in space, SDO has had a chance to do what few other satellites have been able to do – watch the sun for the majority of a solar cycle in 11 types of light.

The sun’s activity rises and falls in a pattern that lasts about 11 years on average. This is called the solar cycle.

Solar activity can influence Earth. For instance, it’s behind one of Earth’s most dazzling natural events – the aurora.

One of the most common triggers of the aurora is a type of space weather called a coronal mass ejection, which is a billion-ton cloud of magnetic solar material expelled into space at around a million miles an hour. 

When these clouds collide with Earth’s magnetic field, they can rattle it, sending particles down into the atmosphere and triggering the auroras. These events can also cause satellite damage and power grid strain in extreme cases. 

The sun is in a declining activity phase, so coronal mass ejections will be less common over the next few years, as will another one of the main indicators of solar activity – sunspots.

Sunspots are created by twisted knots of magnetic field. Solar material in these tangled regions is slightly cooler than the surrounding areas, making them appear dark in visible light.

The tangled magnetic field that creates sunspots also causes most solar activity, so more sunspots means more solar activity, and vice versa. Humans have been able to track the solar cycle by counting sunspots since the 17th century.  

Image: Houghton Library, Harvard University, *IC6.G1333.613ia

The peak of the sun’s activity for this cycle, called solar maximum, was in 2014. 

Now, we’re heading towards the lowest solar activity for this solar cycle, also known as solar minimum. As solar activity declines, the number of sunspots decreases. We sometimes go several days without a single visible sunspot.

But there’s much more to the story than sunspots – SDO also watches the sun in a type of light called extreme ultraviolet. This type of light is invisible to human eyes and is blocked by our atmosphere, so we can only see the sun this way with satellites.

Extreme ultraviolet light reveals different layers of the sun’s atmosphere, helping scientists connect the dots between the sunspots that appear in visible light and the space weather that impacts us here on Earth.

SDO keeps an eye on the sun 24/7, and you can see near real-time images of the sun in 11 types of light at sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data.

What Astronauts in Space Eat in a Day

There was a time when even NASA didn’t know if humans could eat in the microgravity environment of space. Thankfully for the future of long-term crewed missions, John Glenn proved that it was indeed possible when he ate applesauce from an aluminum tube while orbiting the Earth in 1962.

Since then, the research conducted at our Space Food Systems Laboratory at Johnson Space Center has resulted in improved taste, variety and packaging of foods intended for space travel. Current-day astronauts are now given a standard menu of over 200 approved food and drink items months before launch, allowing them to plan their daily meals far in advance.

So, with such a variety of foods to choose from, what does the typical astronaut eat in a day?  Here is an example from the International Space Station standard menu:

Sounds tasty, right?

However, these are only suggestions for astronauts, so they still have some choice over what they ultimately eat. Many astronauts, including Tim Kopra, combine different ingredients for meals.

Others plan to eat special foods for the holidays. Astronauts Scott Kelly and Kjell Lindgren did just that on Thanksgiving last year when they ate smoked turkey, candied yams, corn and potatoes au gratin.

Another key factor that influences what astronauts eat is the availability of fresh fruits and vegetables, which are delivered via resupply spacecrafts.  When these foods arrive to the space station, they must be eaten quickly before they spoil. Astronaut Tim Peake doesn’t seem to mind.

Nutrition is important to help counteract some of the effects spaceflight have on the body, such as bone and muscle loss, cardiovascular degradation, impairment of immune function, neurovestibular changes and vision changes. 

“Nutrition is vital to the mission,” Scott M. Smith, Ph.D., manager for NASA’s Nutritional Biochemistry Lab said. “Without proper nutrition for the astronauts, the mission will fail. It’s that simple.”

We work hard to help astronauts feel less homesick by providing them with food that not only reminds them of life back on Earth, but is also nutritious and healthy. 

Here are some unusual space food inventions that are no longer in use:

Gelatin-coated sandwich and cookie cubes

Compressed bacon squares

Freeze dried ice cream

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

Going the Distance... In Space

On April 17, NASA's New Horizons crossed a rare deep-space milestone – 50 astronomical units from the Sun, or 50 times farther from the Sun than Earth is. New Horizons is just the fifth spacecraft to reach this great distance, following the legendary Voyagers 1 and 2 and Pioneers 10 and 11. It’s almost 5 billion miles (7.5 billion kilometers) away; a remote region where a signal radioed from NASA's largest antennas on Earth, even traveling at the speed of light, needs seven hours to reach the far-flung spacecraft.

To celebrate reaching 50 AU, the New Horizons team compiled a list of 50 facts about the mission. Here are just a few of them; you'll find the full collection at: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/Fifty-Facts.php.

New Horizons is the first – and so far, only – spacecraft to visit Pluto. New Horizons sped through the Pluto system on July 14, 2015, providing a history-making close-up view of the dwarf planet and its family of five moons.

New Horizons is carrying some of the ashes of Pluto’s discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh. In 1930, the amateur astronomer spotted Pluto in a series of telescope images at Lowell Observatory in Arizona, making him the first American to discover a planet.

The “Pluto Not Yet Explored” U.S. stamp that New Horizons carries holds the Guinness World Record for the farthest traveled postage stamp. The stamp was part of a series created in 1991, when Pluto was the last unexplored planet in the solar system.

Dispatched at 36,400 miles per hour (58, 500 kilometers per hour) on January 19, 2006, New Horizons is still the fastest human-made object ever launched from Earth.

As the spacecraft flew by Jupiter’s moon Io, in February 2007, New Horizons captured the first detailed movie of a volcano erupting anywhere in the solar system except Earth.

New Horizons’ radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) – its nuclear battery – will provide enough power to keep the spacecraft operating until the late-2030s.

Measurements of the universe’s darkness using New Horizons data found that the universe is twice as bright as predicted – a major extragalactic astronomy discovery!

New Horizons’ Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter is the first student-built instrument on any NASA planetary mission – and is providing unprecedented insight into the dust environment in the outer solar system.

New Horizons is so far away, that even the positons of the stars look different than what we see from Earth. This view of an "alien sky" allowed scientists to make stereo images of the nearest stars against the background of the galaxy.

Arrokoth – the official name the mission team proposed for the Kuiper Belt object New Horizons explored in January 2019 – is a Native American term that means “sky” in the Powhatan/Algonquin language.

Stay tuned in to the latest New Horizons updates on the mission website and follow NASA Solar System on Twitter and Facebook.

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

Dolphins x Astronauts: The collab we didn't know we needed 

A pod of curious dolphins added extra meaning and porpoise to the recovery of Crew-9′s SpaceX Dragon capsule and its four explorers shortly after splashdown. Inside the capsule were astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams, Butch Wilmore, and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, who splashed down off the coast of Florida at 5:57pm ET (2127 UTC) on March 18, 2025, concluding their scientific mission to the International Space Station. See Crew-9 return from deorbit to splashdown in this video. (The dolphins appear at 1:33:56.)

An Exo-What...?

Simply put, an exoplanet is a planet that orbits another star. That said, just because a planet orbits a star (like Earth) does not mean that it is automatically stable for life. The planet must be within the habitable zone, which is the area around a star in which water has the potential to be liquid…aka not so close that all the water would evaporate, and not too far away where all the water would freeze.

Recently, with the help of our Kepler spacecraft, scientists have discovered the most Earth-like exoplanet ever, Kepler-452b. Pretty cool! This chart shows 12 other exoplanet discoveries that are less than twice the size of Earth, and live in the habitable zone of their host star. Kepler-452b is special because all previous findings have orbited stars that are smaller and cooler than Earth’s.

You may be thinking, “Okay, so what? There’s an Earth-like planet that spins around a similar sized sun.” Well, Kepler-452b orbits its sun at nearly the same distance from its star as Earth does from our sun, which means that conditions on the plant could be similar to those here on Earth!

We can already guess your next question…”When are we going to Kepler-452b?!” Well, this planet is located in the constellation Cygnus which is 1,400 light-years away, so not anytime soon. However, our Kepler spacecraft continues to search for Earth-like exoplanets and gather important scientific information about them.

Fun Facts About Mars

Mars is a cold desert world, and is the fourth planet from the sun. It is half the diameter of Earth and has the same amount of dry land. Like Earth, Mars has seasons, polar ice caps, volcanoes, canyons and weather, but its atmosphere is too thin for liquid water to exist for long on the surface. There are signs of ancient floods on the Red Planet, but evidence for water now exists mainly in icy soil and thin clouds.

Earth has one, Mars has two…moons of course! Phobos (fear) and Deimos (panic) are the Red Planet’s two small moons. They are named after the horses that pulled the chariot of the Greek war god Ares, the counterpart to the Roman war god Mars.

The diameter of Mars is 4220 miles (6792 km). That means that the Red Planet is twice as big as the moon, but the Earth is twice as big as Mars.

Since Mars has less gravity than Earth, you would weigh 62% less than you do here on our home planet. Weigh yourself here on the Planets App. What’s the heaviest thing you’ve ever lifted? On Mars, you could have lifted more than twice that! Every 10 pounds on Earth only equals 4 pounds on the Red Planet. Find out why HERE.

Mass is the measurement of the amount of matter something contains. Mars is about 1/10th of the mass of Earth.

Mars and Earth are at their closest point to each other about every two years, with a distance of about 33 million miles between them at that time. The farthest that the Earth and Mars can be apart is: 249 million miles. This is due to the fact that both Mars and Earth have elliptical orbits and Mars’ orbit is tilted in comparison with the Earth’s. They also orbit the sun at different rates.

The temperature on Mars can be as high as 70 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius) or as low as about –225 degrees Fahrenheit (-153 degrees Celsius). How hot or cold the surface varies between day and night and among seasons. Mars is colder than Earth because it is farther from the sun.

You know that onions have layers, but did you know that Mars has layers too? Like Earth, Mars has a crust, a mantle and a core. The same stuff even makes up the planet layers: iron and silicate.

Ever wonder why it’s so hard launching things to space? It’s because the Earth has a log of gravity! Gravity makes things have weight, and the greater the gravity, the more it weights. On Mars, things weigh less because the gravity isn’t as strong.

Take a deep breath. What do you think you just breathed in? Mostly Nitrogen, about a fifth of that breath was Oxygen and the rest was a mix of other gases. To get the same amount of oxygen from one Earth breath, you’d have to take around 14,500 breaths on Mars! With the atmosphere being 100 times less dense, and being mostly carbon dioxide, there’s not a whole lot of oxygen to breathe in.

Mars has about 15% of Earth’s volume. To fill Earth’s volume, it would take over 6 Mars’ volumes.

For more fun Mars facts, visit HERE.

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

What’s Inside a ‘Dead’ Star?

Matter makes up all the stuff we can see in the universe, from pencils to people to planets. But there’s still a lot we don’t understand about it! For example: How does matter work when it’s about to become a black hole? We can’t learn anything about matter after it becomes a black hole, because it’s hidden behind the event horizon, the point of no return. So we turn to something we can study – the incredibly dense matter inside a neutron star, the leftover of an exploded massive star that wasn’t quite big enough to turn into a black hole.

Our Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer, or NICER, is an X-ray telescope perched on the International Space Station. NICER was designed to study and measure the sizes and masses of neutron stars to help us learn more about what might be going on in their mysterious cores.

When a star many times the mass of our Sun runs out of fuel, it collapses under its own weight and then bursts into a supernova. What’s left behind depends on the star’s initial mass. Heavier stars (around 25 times the Sun’s mass or more) leave behind black holes. Lighter ones (between about eight and 25 times the Sun’s mass) leave behind neutron stars.

Neutron stars pack more mass than the Sun into a sphere about as wide as New York City’s Manhattan Island is long. Just one teaspoon of neutron star matter would weigh as much as Mount Everest, the highest mountain on Earth!

These objects have a lot of cool physics going on. They can spin faster than blender blades, and they have powerful magnetic fields. In fact, neutron stars are the strongest magnets in the universe! The magnetic fields can rip particles off the star’s surface and then smack them down on another part of the star. The constant bombardment creates hot spots at the magnetic poles. When the star rotates, the hot spots swing in and out of our view like the beams of a lighthouse.

Neutron stars are so dense that they warp nearby space-time, like a bowling ball resting on a trampoline. The warping effect is so strong that it can redirect light from the star’s far side into our view. This has the odd effect of making the star look bigger than it really is!

NICER uses all the cool physics happening on and around neutron stars to learn more about what’s happening inside the star, where matter lingers on the threshold of becoming a black hole. (We should mention that NICER also studies black holes!)

Scientists think neutron stars are layered a bit like a golf ball. At the surface, there’s a really thin (just a couple centimeters high) atmosphere of hydrogen or helium. In the outer core, atoms have broken down into their building blocks – protons, neutrons, and electrons – and the immense pressure has squished most of the protons and electrons together to form a sea of mostly neutrons.

But what’s going on in the inner core? Physicists have lots of theories. In some traditional models, scientists suggested the stars were neutrons all the way down. Others proposed that neutrons break down into their own building blocks, called quarks. And then some suggest that those quarks could recombine to form new types of particles that aren’t neutrons!

NICER is helping us figure things out by measuring the sizes and masses of neutron stars. Scientists use those numbers to calculate the stars’ density, which tells us how squeezable matter is!

Let’s say you have what scientists think of as a typical neutron star, one weighing about 1.4 times the Sun’s mass. If you measure the size of the star, and it’s big, then that might mean it contains more whole neutrons. If instead it’s small, then that might mean the neutrons have broken down into quarks. The tinier pieces can be packed together more tightly.

NICER has now measured the sizes of two neutron stars, called PSR J0030+0451 and PSR J0740+6620, or J0030 and J0740 for short.

J0030 is about 1.4 times the Sun’s mass and 16 miles across. (It also taught us that neutron star hot spots might not always be where we thought.) J0740 is about 2.1 times the Sun’s mass and is also about 16 miles across. So J0740 has about 50% more mass than J0030 but is about the same size! Which tells us that the matter in neutron stars is less squeezable than some scientists predicted. (Remember, some physicists suggest that the added mass would crush all the neutrons and make a smaller star.) And J0740’s mass and size together challenge models where the star is neutrons all the way down.

So what’s in the heart of a neutron star? We’re still not sure. Scientists will have to use NICER’s observations to develop new models, perhaps where the cores of neutron stars contain a mix of both neutrons and weirder matter, like quarks. We’ll have to keep measuring neutron stars to learn more!

Keep up with other exciting announcements about our universe by following NASA Universe on Twitter and Facebook.

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

Are the rumors about the ozone layer being totally fixed true ? If yes , is it susceptible of being opened again ans if no, is it suspecte

10 Things: Mars Helicopter

When our next Mars rover lands on the Red Planet in 2021, it will deliver a groundbreaking technology demonstration: the first helicopter to ever fly on a planetary body other than Earth. This Mars Helicopter will demonstrate the first controlled, powered, sustained flight on another world. It could also pave the way for future missions that guide rovers and gather science data and images at locations previously inaccessible on Mars. This exciting new technology could change the way we explore Mars.

1. Its body is small, but its blades are mighty.

One of the biggest engineering challenges is getting the Mars Helicopter’s blades just right. They need to push enough air downward to receive an upward force that allows for thrust and controlled flight — a big concern on a planet where the atmosphere is only one percent as dense as Earth’s. “No helicopter has flown in those flight conditions – equivalent to 100,000 feet (30,000 meters) on Earth,” said Bob Balaram, chief engineer for the project at our Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

2. It has to fly in really thin Martian air.

To compensate for Mars’ thin atmosphere, the blades must spin much faster than on an Earth helicopter, and the blade size relative to the weight of the helicopter has to be larger too. The Mars Helicopter’s rotors measure 4 feet wide (about 1.2 meters) long, tip to tip. At 2,800 rotations per minute, it will spin about 10 times faster than an Earth helicopter. At the same time, the blades shouldn’t flap around too much, as the helicopter’s design team discovered during testing. Their solution: make the blades more rigid. “Our blades are much stiffer than any terrestrial helicopter’s would need to be,” Balaram said.   The body, meanwhile, is tiny — about the size of a softball. In total, the helicopter will weigh just under 4 pounds (1.8 kilograms).

3. It will make up to five flights on Mars.

Over a 30-day period on Mars, the helicopter will attempt up to five flights, each time going farther than the last. The helicopter will fly up to 90 seconds at a time, at heights of up to 10 to 15 feet (3 to 5 meters). Engineers will learn a lot about flying a helicopter on Mars with each flight, since it’s never been done before!

4. The Mars Helicopter team has already completed groundbreaking tests.

Because a helicopter has never visited Mars before, the Mars Helicopter team has worked hard to figure out how to predict the helicopter’s performance on the Red Planet. “We had to invent how to do planetary helicopter testing on Earth,” said Joe Melko, deputy chief engineer of Mars Helicopter, based at JPL.

The team, led by JPL and including members from JPL, AeroVironment Inc.,  Ames Research Center, and Langley Research Center, has designed, built and tested a series of test vehicles.

In 2016, the team flew a full-scale prototype test model of the helicopter in the 25-foot (7.6-meter) space simulator at JPL. The chamber simulated the low pressure of the Martian atmosphere. More recently, in 2018, the team built a fully autonomous helicopter designed to operate on Mars, and successfully flew it in the 25-foot chamber in Mars-like atmospheric density.

Engineers have also exercised the rotors of a test helicopter in a cold chamber to simulate the low temperatures of Mars at night. In addition, they have taken design steps to deal with Mars-like radiation conditions. They have also tested the helicopter’s landing gear on Mars-like terrain. More tests are coming to see how it performs with Mars-like winds and other conditions.

5. The camera is as good as your cell phone camera.

The helicopter’s first priority is successfully flying on Mars, so engineering information takes priority. An added bonus is its camera. The Mars Helicopter has the ability to take color photos with a 13-megapixel camera — the same type commonly found in smart phones today. Engineers will attempt to take plenty of good pictures.

6. It’s battery-powered, but the battery is rechargeable.

The helicopter requires 360 watts of power for each second it hovers in the Martian atmosphere – equivalent to the power required by six regular lightbulbs. But it isn’t out of luck when its lithium-ion batteries run dry. A solar array on the helicopter will recharge the batteries, making it a self-sufficient system as long as there is adequate sunlight. Most of the energy will be used to keep the helicopter warm, since nighttime temperatures on Mars plummet to around minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 90 Celsius). During daytime flights, temperatures may rise to a much warmer minus 13 to minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit to (minus 25 to minus 50 degrees Celsius) — still chilly by Earth standards. The solar panel makes an average of 3 watts of power continuously during a 12-hour Martian day.

7. The helicopter will be carried to Mars under the belly of the rover.

Somewhere between 60 to 90 Martian days (or sols) after the Mars 2020 rover lands, the helicopter will be deployed from the underside of the rover. Mars Helicopter Delivery System on the rover will rotate the helicopter down from the rover and release it onto the ground. The rover will then drive away to a safe distance.

8. The helicopter will talk to the rover.

The Mars 2020 rover will act as a telecommunication relay, receiving commands from engineers back on Earth and relaying them to the helicopter. The helicopter will then send images and information about its own performance to the rover, which will send them back to Earth. The rover will also take measurements of wind and atmospheric data to help flight controllers on Earth.

9. It has to fly by itself, with some help.

Radio signals take time to travel to Mars — between four and 21 minutes, depending on where Earth and Mars are in their orbits — so instantaneous communication with the helicopter will be impossible. That means flight controllers can’t use a joystick to fly it in real time, like a video game. Instead, they need to send commands to the helicopter in advance, and the little flying robot will follow through. Autonomous systems will allow the helicopter to look at the ground, analyze the terrain to look how fast it’s moving, and land on its own.

10. It could pave the way for future missions.

A future Mars helicopter could scout points of interest, help scientists and engineers select new locations and plan driving routes for a rover. Larger standalone helicopters could carry science payloads to investigate multiple sites at Mars. Future helicopters could also be used to fly to places on Mars that rovers cannot reach, such as cliffs or walls of craters. They could even assist with human exploration one day. Says Balaram: "Someday, if we send astronauts, these could be the eyes of the astronauts across Mars.”

Read the full version of this week’s ‘10 Things to Know’ article on the web HERE.

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