What Is Your Advice To Someone Who Wants To Follow The Same Steps You Take?

O_o  When we peer deep into space, we don't expect to find something staring back at us...

This galactic ghoul, captured by our Hubble Space Telescope, is actually a titanic head-on collision between two galaxies. Each "eye" is the bright core of a galaxy, one of which slammed into another. The outline of the face is a ring of young blue stars. Other clumps of new stars form a nose and mouth.

Although galaxy collisions are common most of them are not head-on smashups like this Arp-Madore system. Get spooked & find out what lies inside this ghostly apparition, here. 

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Views of Pluto

10 Images to Celebrate the Historic Exploration of the Pluto System

One year ago, our New Horizons mission made history by exploring Pluto and its moons – giving humankind our first close-up look at this fascinating world on the frontier of our solar system.

Since those amazing days in July 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft has transmitted numerous images and many other kinds of data home for scientists and the public alike to study, analyze, and just plain love. From Pluto’s iconic “heart” and sweeping ice-mountain vistas to its flowing glaciers and dramatic blue skies, it’s hard to pick just one favorite picture. So the mission team has picked 10 – and in no special order, placed them here.

Click the titles for more information about each image. You’ve seen nine of them before, and the team added a 10th favorite, also sure to become one of New Horizons’ “greatest hits.”

Vast Glacial Flows

In the northern region of Pluto’s Sputnik Planum, swirl-shaped patterns of light and dark suggest that a surface layer of exotic ices has flowed around obstacles and into depressions, much like glaciers on Earth.

Jagged Ice Shorelines and Snowy Pits

This dramatic image from our New Horizons spacecraft shows the dark, rugged highlands known as Krun Macula (lower right), which border a section of Pluto’s icy plains.

Blue Skies

Pluto's haze layer shows its blue color in this picture taken by the New Horizons Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC). The high-altitude haze is thought to be similar in nature to that seen at Saturn’s moon Titan.

Charon Becomes a Real World

At half the diameter of Pluto, Charon is the largest satellite relative to its planet in the solar system. Many New Horizons scientists expected Charon to be a monotonous, crater-battered world; instead, they’re finding a landscape covered with mountains, canyons, landslides, surface-color variations and more. 

The Vistas of Pluto

Our New Horizons spacecraft looked back toward the sun and captured this near-sunset view of the rugged, icy mountains and flat ice plains extending to Pluto’s horizon. The backlighting highlights over a dozen layers of haze in Pluto’s tenuous but distended atmosphere.

The Dynamic Duo: Pluto and Charon in Enhanced Color

The color and brightness of both Pluto and Charon have been processed identically to allow direct comparison of their surface properties, and to highlight the similarity between Charon’s polar red terrain and Pluto’s equatorial red terrain. Pluto and Charon are shown with approximately correct relative sizes, but their true separation is not to scale. 

Strange Snakeskin Terrain

A moment’s study reveals surface features that appear to be texturally ‘snakeskin’-like, owing to their north-south oriented scaly raised relief. A digital elevation model created by the New Horizons’ geology shows that these bladed structures have typical relief of about 550 yards (500 meters). Their relative spacing of about 3-5 kilometers makes them some of the steepest features seen on Pluto.

Pluto’s Heart

This view is dominated by the large, bright feature informally named the “heart,” which measures approximately 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) across. The heart borders darker equatorial terrains, and the mottled terrain to its east (right) are complex. However, even at this resolution, much of the heart’s interior appears remarkably featureless—possibly a sign of ongoing geologic processes.

Far Away Snow-Capped Mountains

One of Pluto’s most identifiable features, Cthulhu (pronounced kuh-THU-lu) stretches nearly halfway around Pluto’s equator, starting from the west of the great nitrogen ice plains known as Sputnik Planum. Measuring approximately 1,850 miles (3,000 kilometers) long and 450 miles (750 kilometers) wide, Cthulhu is a bit larger than the state of Alaska.

Colorful Composition Maps of Pluto

The powerful instruments on New Horizons not only gave scientists insight on what Pluto looked like, their data also confirmed (or, in many cases, dispelled) their ideas of what Pluto was made of. These compositional maps – assembled using data from the Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA) component of the Ralph instrument – indicate the regions rich in ices of methane (CH4), nitrogen (N2) and carbon monoxide (CO),  and, of course, water ice (H2O).

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CAPSTONE: Testing a Path to the Moon

Before NASA's Artemis astronauts head to the Moon, a microwave oven-sized spacecraft will help lead the way. The Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment, or CAPSTONE, is a CubeSat mission set to launch in spring of 2022. For at least six months, the small spacecraft will fly a unique elongated path around the Moon. Its trajectory—known as a near rectilinear halo orbit—has never been flown before! Once tried and tested, the same orbit will be home to NASA’s future lunar space station Gateway. Here are five things to know:

1. The 55-pound (25 kg) spacecraft is equipped with solar arrays, a camera, and antennae for communication and navigation.

2. Powerful thrusters will help propel the CubeSat toward the Moon.

3. CAPSTONE will fly a unique elongated path around the Moon for at least six months.

4. At its closest approach, it will come within 2,100 miles (3,380 km) of the Moon's North Pole.

5. The same orbit will be home to Gateway— our future outpost for Artemis astronauts heading to the Moon and beyond.

CAPSTONE is commercially owned and operated by Advanced Space in Westminster, Colorado. NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology program within the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate funds the demonstration mission. The program is based at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. The development of CAPSTONE’s navigation technology is supported by NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer program. The Artemis Campaign Development Division within NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate funds the launch and supports mission operations. The Launch Services Program at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida manages the launch.

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Gamma-ray Bursts: Black Hole Birth Announcements

Gamma-ray bursts are the brightest, most violent explosions in the universe, but they can be surprisingly tricky to detect. Our eyes can't see them because they are tuned to just a limited portion of the types of light that exist, but thanks to technology, we can even see the highest-energy form of light in the cosmos — gamma rays.

So how did we discover gamma-ray bursts? 

Accidentally!

We didn’t actually develop gamma-ray detectors to peer at the universe — we were keeping an eye on our neighbors! During the Cold War, the United States and the former Soviet Union both signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 that stated neither nation would test nuclear weapons in space. Just one week later, the US launched the first Vela satellite to ensure the treaty wasn’t being violated. What they saw instead were gamma-ray events happening out in the cosmos!

Things Going Bump in the Cosmos

Each of these gamma-ray events, dubbed “gamma-ray bursts” or GRBs, lasted such a short time that information was very difficult to gather. For decades their origins, locations and causes remained a cosmic mystery, but in recent years we’ve been able to figure out a lot about GRBs. They come in two flavors: short-duration (less than two seconds) and long-duration (two seconds or more). Short and long bursts seem to be caused by different cosmic events, but the end result is thought to be the birth of a black hole.

Short GRBs are created by binary neutron star mergers. Neutron stars are the superdense leftover cores of really massive stars that have gone supernova. When two of them crash together (long after they’ve gone supernova) the collision releases a spectacular amount of energy before producing a black hole. Astronomers suspect something similar may occur in a merger between a neutron star and an already-existing black hole.

Long GRBs account for most of the bursts we see and can be created when an extremely massive star goes supernova and launches jets of material at nearly the speed of light (though not every supernova will produce a GRB). They can last just a few seconds or several minutes, though some extremely long GRBs have been known to last for hours!

A Gamma-Ray Burst a Day Sends Waves of Light Our Way!

Our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detects a GRB nearly every day, but there are actually many more happening — we just can’t see them! In a GRB, the gamma rays are shot out in a narrow beam. We have to be lined up just right in order to detect them, because not all bursts are beamed toward us — when we see one it's because we're looking right down the barrel of the gamma-ray gun. Scientists estimate that there are at least 50 times more GRBs happening each day than we detect!

So what’s left after a GRB — just a solitary black hole? Since GRBs usually last only a matter of seconds, it’s very difficult to study them in-depth. Fortunately, each one leaves an afterglow that can last for hours or even years in extreme cases. Afterglows are created when the GRB jets run into material surrounding the star. Because that material slows the jets down, we see lower-energy light, like X-rays and radio waves, that can take a while to fade. Afterglows are so important in helping us understand more about GRBs that our Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory was specifically designed to study them!

Last fall, we had the opportunity to learn even more from a gamma-ray burst than usual! From 130 million light-years away, Fermi witnessed a pair of neutron stars collide, creating a spectacular short GRB. What made this burst extra special was the fact that ground-based gravitational wave detectors LIGO and Virgo caught the same event, linking light and gravitational waves to the same source for the first time ever!

For over 10 years now, Fermi has been exploring the gamma-ray universe. Thanks to Fermi, scientists are learning more about the fundamental physics of the cosmos, from dark matter to the nature of space-time and beyond. Discover more about how we’ll be celebrating Fermi’s achievements all year!

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Juno Spacecraft: What Do We Hope to Learn?

The Juno spacecraft has been traveling toward its destination since its launch in 2011, and is set to insert Jupiter’s orbit on July 4. Jupiter is by far the largest planet in the solar system. Humans have been studying it for hundreds of years, yet still many basic questions about the gas world remain.

The primary goal of the Juno spacecraft is to reveal the story of the formation and evolution of the planet Jupiter. Understanding the origin and evolution of Jupiter can provide the knowledge needed to help us understand the origin of our solar system and planetary systems around other stars.

Have We Visited Jupiter Before? Yes! In 1995, our Galileo mission (artist illustration above) made the voyage to Jupiter. One of its jobs was to drop a probe into Jupiter’s atmosphere. The data showed us that the composition was different than scientists thought, indicating that our theories of planetary formation were wrong.

What’s Different About This Visit? The Juno spacecraft will, for the first time, see below Jupiter’s dense clover of clouds. [Bonus Fact: This is why the mission was named after the Roman goddess, who was Jupiter’s wife, and who could also see through the clouds.]

Unlocking Jupiter’s Secrets

Specifically, Juno will…

Determine how much water is in Jupiter’s atmosphere, which helps determine which planet formation theory is correct (or if new theories are needed)

Look deep into Jupiter’s atmosphere to measure composition, temperature, cloud motions and other properties

Map Jupiter’s magnetic and gravity fields, revealing the planet’s deep structure

Explore and study Jupiter’s magnetosphere near the planet’s poles, especially the auroras – Jupiter’s northern and southern lights – providing new insights about how the planet’s enormous

Juno will let us take a giant step forward in our understanding of how giant planets form and the role these titans played in putting together the rest of the solar system.

For updates on the Juno mission, follow the spacecraft on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Tumblr.

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How We’re Accelerating Our Missions to the Moon

Our Space Launch System isn’t your average rocket. It is the only rocket that can send our Orion spacecraft, astronauts and supplies to the Moon. To accomplish this mega-feat, it has to be the most powerful rocket ever built. SLS has already marked a series of milestones moving it closer to its first launch, Artemis.

Here are four highlights you need to know about — plus one more just on the horizon.

Counting Down

Earlier this month, Boeing technicians at our Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans successfully joined the top part to the core stage with the liquid hydrogen tank. The core stage will provide the most of the power to launch Artemis 1. Our 212-foot-tall core stage, the largest the we have ever built, has five major structural parts. With the addition of the liquid hydrogen tank to the forward join, four of the five parts have been bolted together. Technicians are finishing up the final part — the complex engine section — and plan to bolt it in place later this summer.  

Ready to Rumble

This August, to be exact. That’s when the engines for Artemis 1 will be added to the core stage. Earlier this year, all the engines for the first four SLS flights were updated with controllers, tested and officially cleared “go” for launch. We’ve saved time and money by modifying 16 RS-25 engines from the space shuttle and creating a more powerful version of the solid rocket boosters that launched the shuttle. In April, the last engine from the shuttle program finished up a four-year test series that included 32 tests at our Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. These acceptance tests proved the engines could operate at a higher thrust level necessary for deep space travel and that new, modernized flight controllers —the “brains” of the engine — are ready to send astronauts to the Moon in 2024.

Getting a Boost

Our industry partners have completed the manufacture and checkout of 10 motor segments that will power two of the largest propellant boosters ever built. Just like the engines, these boosters are designed to be fast and powerful. Each booster burns six tons of propellant every second, generating a max thrust of 3.6 million pounds for two minutes of pure awesome. The boosters will finish assembly at our Kennedy Space Center in Florida and readied for the rocket’s first launch in 2020. In the meantime, we are well underway in completing the boosters for SLS and Orion’s second flight in 2022.

Come Together

Meanwhile, other parts of the rocket are finished and ready for the ride to the Moon. The final piece of the upper part of the rocket, the launch vehicle stage adapter, will soon head toward Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Two other pieces, including the interim cryogenic propulsion stage that will provide the power in space to send Orion on to the Moon, have already been delivered to Kennedy.

Looking to the Future

Our engineers evaluated thousands of designs before selecting the current SLS rocket design. Now, they are performing critical testing and using lessons learned from current assembly to ensure the initial and future designs are up to the tasks of launching exploration missions for years to come. This real-time evaluation means engineers and technicians are already cutting down on assembly time for future mission hardware, so that we and our partners can stay on target to return humans to the Moon by 2024 — to stay so we can travel on to Mars.

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A Total Solar Eclipse Over South America

On Dec. 14, 2020, a total solar eclipse will pass over Chile and Argentina.

Solar eclipses happen when the Moon lines up just right between the Sun and Earth, allowing it to cast its shadow on Earth’s surface. People within the outer part of the Moon’s shadow will see the Sun partially blocked by the Moon, and those in the inner part of the shadow will see a total solar eclipse.

The Moon’s orbit around Earth is slightly tilted, meaning this alignment doesn’t happen on every orbit. Total solar eclipses happen somewhere on Earth about once every 18 months.

During a total solar eclipse, the Moon blocks out the Sun’s bright face, revealing its comparatively faint outer atmosphere, the corona. This provides Sun-watchers and scientists alike with a rare chance to see the solar corona closer to the Sun’s surface than is usually possible.

Scientists can take advantage of this unparalleled view — and solar eclipses’ unique effects on Earth’s atmosphere — to perform unique scientific studies on the Sun and its effects on Earth. Several NASA-funded science teams performed such studies during the total solar eclipse in the United States on Aug. 21, 2017. Read about what they’ve learned so far.

Watching the eclipse

We’ll be carrying images of December’s eclipse — courtesy of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile — on NASA TV and on the agency’s website starting at 9:40 a.m. EST on Dec. 14.

We’ll also have a live show in Spanish from 10:30 – 11:30 a.m. EST featuring views of the eclipse and NASA scientists.

If you’re observing the eclipse in person, remember that it’s never safe to look directly at the uneclipsed or partially eclipsed Sun. You can use special solar viewing glasses (NOT sunglasses) or an indirect method like pinhole projection to watch the eclipse in person.

For people in the path of totality, there will be a few brief moments when it is safe to look directly at the eclipse. Only once the Moon has completely covered the Sun and there is no sunlight shining is it safe to look at the eclipse. Make sure you put your eclipse glasses back on or return to indirect viewing before the first flash of sunlight appears around the Moon’s edge.

Mira el eclipse en vivo comentado por científicas de la NASA de 10:30 a 11:30 a.m. EST el 14 de diciembre en NASA TV y la página web de la agencia. Lee más sobre el eclipse y cómo observarlo de forma segura aquí: https://ciencia.nasa.gov/eclipse-de-2020-en-america-del-sur Y sigue a NASA en español en Instagram, Twitter, YouTube y Facebook.

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A Wider Set of Eyes on the Universe

After years of preparatory studies, we are formally starting an astrophysics mission designed to help unlock the secrets of the universe. 

Introducing…

the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, aka WFIRST.

With a view 100 times bigger than that of our Hubble Space Telescope, WFIRST will help unravel the secrets of dark energy and dark matter, and explore the evolution of the cosmos. It will also help us discover new worlds and advance the search for planets suitable for life.

WFIRST is slated to launch in the mid-2020s. The observatory will begin operations after traveling about one million miles from Earth, in a direction directly opposite the sun.

Telescopes usually come in two different “flavors” - you have really big, powerful telescopes, but those telescopes only see a tiny part of the sky. Or, telescopes are smaller and so they lack that power, but they can see big parts of the sky. WFIRST is the best of worlds.

No matter how good a telescope you build, it’s always going to have some residual errors. WFIRST will be the first time that we’re going to fly an instrument that contains special mirrors that will allow us to correct for errors in the telescope. This has never been done in space before!

Employing multiple techniques, astronomers will also use WFIRST to track how dark energy and dark matter have affected the evolution of our universe. Dark energy is a mysterious, negative pressure that has been speeding up the expansion of the universe. Dark matter is invisible material that makes up most of the matter in our universe.

Single WFIRST images will contain over a million galaxies! We can’t categorize and catalogue those galaxies on our own, which is where citizen science comes in. This allows interested people in the general public to solve scientific problems.

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Space Station Research: Cardiovascular Health

Each month, we highlight a different research topic on the International Space Station. In February, our focus is cardiovascular health, which coincides with the American Hearth Month.

Like bones and muscle, the cardiovascular system deconditions (gets weaker) in microgravity. Long-duration spaceflight may increase the risk of damage and inflammation in the cardiovascular system primarily from radiation, but also from psychological stress, reduced physical activity, diminished nutritional standards and, in the case of extravehicular activity, increased oxygen exposure.

Even brief periods of exposure to reduced-gravity environments can result in cardiovascular changes such as fluid shifts, changes in total blood volume, heartbeat and heart rhythm irregularities and diminished aerobic capacity.

The weightless environment of space also causes fluid shifts to occur in the body. This normal shift of fluids to the upper body in space causes increased inter-cranial pressure which could be reducing visual capacity in astronauts. We are currently testing how this can be counteracted by returning fluids to the lower body using a “lower body negative pressure” suit, also known as Chibis.

Spaceflight also accelerates the aging process, and it is important to understand this process to develop specific countermeasures. Developing countermeasures to keep astronauts’ hearts healthy in space is applicable to heart health on Earth, too!

On the space station, one of the tools we have to study heart health is the ultrasound device, which uses harmless sound waves to take detailed images of the inside of the body. These images are then viewed by researchers and doctors inside Mission Control. So with minimal training on ultrasound, remote guidance techniques allow astronauts to take images of their own heart while in space. These remote medicine techniques can also be beneficial on Earth.

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Experience High-Res Science in First 8K Footage from Space

Fans of science in space can now experience fast-moving footage in even higher definition as NASA delivers the first 8K ultra high definition (UHD) video of astronauts living, working and conducting research from the International Space Station.

The same engineers who sent high-definition (HD) cameras, 3D cameras, and a camera capable of recording 4K footage to the space station have now delivered a new camera– Helium 8K camera by RED – capable of recording images with four times the resolution than the previous camera offered.

Let’s compare this camera to others: The Helium 8K camera is capable of shooting at resolutions ranging from conventional HDTV up to 8K, specifically 8192 x 4320 pixels. By comparison, the average HD consumer television displays up to 1920 x 1080 pixels of resolution, and digital cinemas typically project 2K to 4K.

Viewers can watch as crew members advance DNA sequencing in space with the BEST investigation, study dynamic forces between sediment particles with BCAT-CS, learn about genetic differences in space-grown and Earth-grown plants with Plant Habitat-1, observe low-speed water jets to improve combustion processes within engines with Atomization and explore station facilities such as the MELFI, the Plant Habitat, the Life Support Rack, the JEM Airlock and the CanadArm2.

Delivered to the station aboard the fourteenth SpaceX cargo resupply mission through a Space Act Agreement between NASA and RED, this camera’s ability to record twice the pixels and at resolutions four times higher than the 4K camera brings science in orbit into the homes, laboratories and classrooms of everyone on Earth. 

While the 8K resolutions are optimal for showing on movie screens, NASA video editors are working on space station footage for public viewing on YouTube. Viewers will be able to watch high-resolution footage from inside and outside the orbiting laboratory right on their computer screens. Viewers will need a screen capable of displaying 8K resolution for the full effect, but the imagery still trumps that of standard cameras. RED videos and pictures are shot at a higher fidelity and then down-converted, meaning much more information is captured in the images, which results in higher-quality playback, even if viewers don't have an 8K screen.   

The full UHD files are available for download for use in broadcast. Read the NASA media usage guidelines.