What’s Your Favorite Part Of The Job?

How to Connect with NASA

We're the nation’s space agency, but that doesn’t mean you have to travel to the depths of the universe to stay connected with the awesome stuff we’re doing. There are actually some really easy ways to stay updated on all things space. Check them out:

Apps

We have lots of apps for smartphones and tablets that will make it easier than ever to stay connected to space. Here are a few to pique your interest:  

NASA App: Showcases a huge collection of the latest content, including images, videos, mission information, stories, space station sighting opportunities and more! Download: Apple/Android

NASA Spinoff App: This application profiles the best examples of technology that have been transferred from NASA research and missions into commercial products. From life-saving satellite systems to hospital robots, our technologies benefit society. Download: Apple

NASA 3DV App: The 3DV mobile app allows you to examine several of our Deep Space Exploration projects that will take our space program to asteroids, Mars and beyond! Download: Apple/Android

Spacecraft 3D: This augmented reality (AR) application lets you learn about and interact with a variety of spacecraft that are used to explore our solar system, study Earth and observe the universe. Download: Apple/Android

Competitions and Challenges

NASA Solve is an invitation to members of the public to contribute their time and expertise to solving problems and potentially winning prizes as a result of their work. This is a great way for individual members of the public to be a part of the nation’s space program. For a complete list of current challenges and competitions, visit THIS page.

Citizen Science

You don’t have to be a NASA employee to engage in the fun of interpreting scientific data and imagery from our many spacecraft and missions. As part of our Open Government plan, our goal is to promote transparency, participation and collaboration. By expanding the research base and using open innovation, we are all able to benefit from the accumulated findings. You can find data from our missions, research and activities HERE.

Email and Social Media

We have a wide-range of social media accounts here at NASA. Everything from Earth Science to the Mars Curiosity Rover, you can stay updated on many of our missions on many popular social media sites. For a full list of our accounts, visit THIS page.

If you’d like to get space news delivered straight to your inbox, you can sign up for updates and manage preferences HERE.

NASA Socials

What is a NASA Social? We’re glad you asked! These programs provide opportunities for our social media followers to learn and share information about our missions, people and programs. NASA Social includes both special in-person events and social media credentials for individuals who share the news in a significant way. Social events provide the participants with the opportunity to go behind-the-scenes at our facilities and events and speak with scientists engineers, astronauts and managers. Visit THIS page for a list of upcoming NASA Social opportunities.

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

Mars in a Box: How a Metal Chamber on Earth Helps us do Experiments on Mars

Inside this metal box, it’s punishingly cold. The air is unbreathable. The pressure is so low, you’d inflate like a balloon. This metal chamber is essentially Mars in a box — or a near-perfect replica of the Martian environment. This box allows scientists to practice chemistry experiments on Earth before programming NASA’s Curiosity rover to carry them out on Mars. In some cases, scientists use this chamber to duplicate experiments from Mars to better understand the results. This is what’s happening today.

The ladder is set so an engineer can climb to the top of the chamber to drop in a pinch of lab-made Martian rock. A team of scientists is trying to duplicate one of Curiosity’s first experiments to settle some open questions about the origin of certain organic compounds the rover found in Gale Crater on Mars. Today’s sample will be dropped for chemical analysis into a tiny lab inside the chamber known as SAM, which stands for Sample Analysis at Mars. Another SAM lab is on Mars, inside the belly of Curiosity. The SAM lab analyzes rock and soil samples in search of organic matter, which on Earth is usually associated with life. Mars-in-a-box is kept at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

This is Goddard engineer Ariel Siguelnitzky. He is showing how far he has to drop the sample, from the top of the test chamber to the sample collection cup, a small capsule about half an inch (1 centimeter) tall (pictured right below). On Mars, there are no engineers like Siguelnitzky, so Curiosity’s arm drops soil and rock powder through small funnels on its deck. In the photo, Siguelnitzky’s right hand is pointing to a model of the tiny lab, which is about the size of a microwave. SAM will heat the soil to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees Celsius) to extract the gases inside and reveal the chemical elements the soil is made of. It takes about 30 minutes for the oven to reach that super high temperature.

Each new sample is dropped into one of the white cups set into a carousel inside SAM. There are 74 tiny cups. Inside Curiosity’s SAM lab, the cups are made of quartz glass or metal. After a cup is filled, it’s lifted into an oven inside SAM for heating and analysis.

Amy McAdam, a NASA Goddard geochemist, hands Siguelnitzky the sample. Members of the SAM team made it in the lab using Earthly ingredients that duplicate Martian rock powder. The powder is wrapped in a nickel capsule (see photo below) to protect the sample cups so they can be reused many times. On Mars, there’s no nickel capsule around the sample, which means the sample cups there can’t be reused very much.

SAM needs as little as 45 milligrams of soil or rock powder to reveal the secrets locked in minerals and organic matter on the surface of Mars and in its atmosphere. That’s smaller than a baby aspirin!

Siguelnitzky has pressurized the chamber – raised the air pressure to match that of Earth – in order to open the hatch on top of the Mars box.

Now, he will carefully insert the sample into SAM through one of the two small openings below the hatch. They’re about 1.5 inches (3.8 centimeters) across, the same as on Curiosity. Siguelnitzky will use a special tool to carefully insert the sample capsule about two feet down to the sample cup in the carousel.

Sample drop.

NASA Goddard scientist Samuel Teinturier is reviewing the chemical data, shown in the graphs, coming in from SAM inside Mars-in-a-box. He’s looking to see if the lab-made rock powder shows similar chemical signals to those seen during an earlier experiment on Mars.

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

Tracking a Warming Arctic – From Underground to High in the Sky

The Arctic is warming much faster than the rest of Earth. This warming is creating big and small changes, some of which could ripple beyond the planet’s frozen regions and affect us world-wide – possibly raising sea levels, increasing greenhouse warming and affecting wildlife.

Our Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment, known as ABoVE, just began a 10-year mission in Alaska and western Canada, studying these changes.

Underground: Permafrost is the layer of frozen soil beneath some Arctic forests and tundra. 

Like the name suggests, this icy layer stays solid year-round, so when it does melt, it can create big problems. The soil above the thawing permafrost can collapse, creating this wobbly, unstable surface.

7 feet above sea level: As the permafrost thaws, the soil above it can fall away. 

Along the banks of the Itkillik River in Alaska, thawing permafrost has dripped into the water, eroding the cliff side. Known as the “Stinky Bluffs,” this permafrost contains lots of frozen organic matter from dead plants and animals. As the permafrost thaws, this organic matter doesn’t just smell, it also releases carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, adding to the warming effect.

446 feet above sea level: Wildfires aren’t unusual in the forests and shrub lands of Alaska, but as the climate continues to warm, they burn longer and do more damage. 

People who live off the land in the region help researchers understand where plant life isn’t growing back after fires.

100-1000 feet above sea level: Researchers set up 100-foot tall towers at strategic locations throughout Alaska to measure carbon dioxide and methane emissions from right above the forest canopy. 

This provides an up-close look at what gases are released or absorbed from the trees, or swirl in from neighboring regions. These data are combined with measurements taken from airplanes and satellites to create a clearer picture of how much carbon is entering the atmosphere.

3,369 feet above sea level: Dall sheep live in several Alaskan mountain ranges, where they’re critical to both the tourism and sports hunting economies. 

Credit: National Park Service

Changes in temperature and vegetation can profoundly affect their behavior, like grazing habits, and so researchers study how changing plant life and snow cover affect the sheep.

100-30,000 feet above sea level: Carbon emissions in the air come from thawing permafrost, fossil fuel burning, decaying vegetation and wildfires burning across the Arctic-boreal regions. 

One experiment in the ABoVE campaign measures these emissions with instruments on a DC-8 plane.

About 30,000 feet about sea level: When wildfires burn through vegetation, the effects extend far beyond what we see on the ground. 

Fires release carbon stored in the plants into the atmosphere, where it affects air quality and contributes to the greenhouse effect.

438 miles: Our ABoVE campaign combines research on the ground and from planes with data collected by a fleet of Earth-observing satellites, orbiting Earth hundreds of miles above the surface. 

Data from these satellites provides information on vegetation, atmospheric particles and gasses, and how humans are impacting our planet. With all these data sets analyzed by computer programs, the result is a comprehensive picture of our warming planet.

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

The Summer Solstice Has Arrived!

This year’s summer solstice for the northern hemisphere arrives at 11:54 a.m. EDT, meaning today is the longest day of the year! The number of daylight hours varies by latitude, so our headquarters in Washington, D.C. will see 14 hours, 53 minutes, and 51 seconds of daylight. A lot can happen in that time! Let’s find out more.

If you’re spending the day outside, you might be in the path of our Earth Science Satellite Fleet (ESSF)! The fleet, made up of over a dozen Earth observation satellites, will pass over the continental United States about 37 times during today’s daylight hours. 

These missions collect data on atmospheric chemistry and composition, cloud cover, ocean levels, climate, ecosystem dynamics, precipitation, and glacial movement, among other things. They aim to do everything from predicting extreme weather to helping informing the public and decision makers with the environment through GPS and imaging. Today, their sensors will send back over 200 gigabytes (GB) of data back to the ground by sunset. 

As the sun sets today, the International Space Station (ISS) will be completing its 10th orbit since sunrise. In that time, a little more than 1 terabyte-worth of data will be downlinked to Earth.

That number encompasses data from ground communications, payloads, experiments, and control and navigation signals for the station. Approximately 330 GB of that TB is video, including live broadcasts and downlinks with news outlets. But as recently-returned astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor likes to point out, there’s still room for fun. The astronauts aboard the ISS can request YouTube videos or movies for what she likes to call “family movie night.”

Astronauts aboard the station also send back images—LOTS of them. Last year, astronauts sent back an average of 66,912 images per month! During today’s long hours of daylight, we expect the crew to send back about 656 images. But with Expedition 59 astronauts David Saint-Jacques (CSA), Anne McClain (NASA), and Oleg Kononenko (RKA) hard at work preparing to return to Earth on Monday, that number might be a little less. 

Say you’re feeling left out after seeing the family dinners and want to join the crew. Would you have enough daylight to travel to the ISS and back on the longest day of the year? Yes, but only if you’re speedy enough, and plan your launch just right. With the current fastest launch-to-docking time of about six hours, you could complete two-and-a-half flights to the ISS today between sunrise and sunset.

When returning from orbit, it’s a longer ordeal. After the Expedition 59 trio arrives on Earth Monday night, they’ll have to travel from Kazakhstan to Houston to begin their post-flight activities. Their journey should take about 18 hours and 30 minutes, just a few hours longer than the hours of daylight we’ll see today.

Happy solstice! Make sure to tune in with us on Monday night for live coverage of the return of Expedition 59. Until then, enjoy the longest day of the year!

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

What is your advise to people who wanna be astronaut?

Where in the World is Our Flying Telescope? New Zealand!

Our flying observatory SOFIA carries a telescope inside this Boeing 747SP aircraft. Scientists use SOFIA to study the universe — including stars, planets and black holes — while flying as high as 45,000 feet.

SOFIA is typically based at our Armstrong Flight Research Center in Palmdale, California, but recently arrived in Christchurch, New Zealand, to study celestial objects that are best observed from the Southern Hemisphere.

So what will we study from the land down under?

Eta Carinae

Eta Carinae, in the southern constellation Carina, is the most luminous stellar system within 10,000 light-years of Earth. It’s made of two massive stars that are shrouded in dust and gas from its previous eruptions and may one day explode as a supernova. We will analyze the dust and gas around it to learn how this violent system evolves.

Celestial Magnetic Fields

We can study magnetic fields in the center of our Milky Way galaxy from New Zealand because there the galaxy is high in the sky — where we can observe it for long periods of time. We know that this area has strong magnetic fields that affect the material spiraling into the black hole here and forming new stars. But we want to learn about their shape and strength to understand how magnetic fields affect the processes in our galactic center.

Saturn’s Moon Titan

Titan is Saturn’s largest moon and is the only moon in our solar system to have a thick atmosphere — it’s filled with a smog-like haze. It also has seasons, each lasting about seven Earth years. We want to learn if its atmosphere changes seasonally.

Titan will pass in front of a star in an eclipse-like event called an occultation. We’ll chase down the shadow it casts on Earth’s surface, and fly our airborne telescope directly in its center. 

From there, we can determine the temperature, pressure and density of Titan’s atmosphere. Now that our Cassini Spacecraft has ended its mission, the only way we can continue to monitor its atmosphere is by studying these occultation events.

Nearby Galaxies

The Large Magellanic Cloud is a galaxy near our own, but it’s only visible from the Southern Hemisphere! Inside of it are areas filled with newly forming stars and the leftovers from a supernova explosion.

The Tarantula Nebula

The Tarantula Nebula, also called 30 Doradus, is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud and shown here in this image from Chandra, Hubble and Spitzer. It holds a cluster of thousands of stars forming simultaneously. Once the stars are born, their light and winds push out the material leftover from their parent clouds — potentially leaving nothing behind to create more new stars. We want to know if the material is still expanding and forming new stars, or if the star-formation process has stopped. So our team on SOFIA will make a map showing the speed and direction of the gas in the nebula to determine what’s happening inside it.

Supernova 1987A

Also in the Large Magellanic Cloud is Supernova 1987A, the closest supernova explosion witnessed in almost 400 years. We will continue studying this supernova to better understand the material expanding out from it, which may become the building blocks of future stars and planets. Many of our telescopes have studied Supernova 1987A, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, but our instruments on SOFIA are the only tools we can use to study the debris around it with infrared light, which let us better understand characteristics of the dust that cannot be measured using other wavelengths of light.

For live updates about our New Zealand observations follow SOFIA on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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

In Conversation with the Sun: Parker Solar Probe Communications

Our Sun powers life on Earth. It defines our days, nourishes our crops and even fuels our electrical grids. In our pursuit of knowledge about the universe, we’ve learned so much about the Sun, but in many ways we’re still in conversation with it, curious about its mysteries.

Parker Solar Probe will advance this conversation, flying through the Sun’s atmosphere as close as 3.8 million miles from our star’s surface, more than seven times closer to it than any previous spacecraft. If space were a football field, with Earth at one end and the Sun at the other, Parker would be at the four-yard line, just steps away from the Sun! This journey will revolutionize our understanding of the Sun, its surface and solar winds.

Supporting Parker on its journey to the Sun are our communications networks. Three networks, the Near Earth Network, the Space Network and the Deep Space Network, provide our spacecraft with their communications, delivering their data to mission operations centers. Their services ensure that missions like Parker have communications support from launch through the mission.

For Parker’s launch on Aug. 12, the Delta IV Heavy rocket that sent Parker skyward relied on the Space Network. A team at Goddard Space Flight Center’s Networks Integration Center monitored the launch, ensuring that we maintained tracking and communications data between the rocket and the ground. This data is vital, allowing engineers to make certain that Parker stays on the right path towards its orbit around the Sun.

The Space Network’s constellation of Tracking and Data Relay Satellites (TDRS) enabled constant communications coverage for the rocket as Parker made its way out of Earth’s atmosphere. These satellites fly in geosynchronous orbit, circling Earth in step with its rotation, relaying data from spacecraft at lower altitudes to the ground. The network’s three collections of TDRS over the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans provide enough coverage for continuous communications for satellites in low-Earth orbit.

The Near Earth Network’s Launch Communications Segment tracked early stages of Parker's launch, testing our brand new ground stations’ ability to provide crucial information about the rocket’s initial velocity (speed) and trajectory (path). When fully operational, it will support launches from the Kennedy spaceport, including upcoming Orion missions. The Launch Communications Segment’s three ground stations are located at Kennedy Space Center; Ponce De Leon, Florida; and Bermuda. 

When Parker separated from the Delta IV Heavy, the Deep Space Network took over. Antennas up to 230 feet in diameter at ground stations in California, Australia and Spain are supporting Parker for its 24 orbits around the Sun and the seven Venus flybys that gradually shrink its orbit, bringing it closer and closer to the Sun. The Deep Space Network is delivering data to mission operations centers and will continue to do so as long as Parker is operational.

Near the Sun, radio interference and the heat load on the spacecraft’s antenna makes communicating with Parker a challenge that we must plan for. Parker has three distinct communications phases, each corresponding to a different part of its orbit.

When Parker comes closest to the Sun, the spacecraft will emit a beacon tone that tells engineers on the ground about its health and status, but there will be very little opportunity to command the spacecraft and downlink data. High data rate transmission will only occur during a portion of Parker’s orbit, far from the Sun. The rest of the time, Parker will be in cruise mode, taking measurements and being commanded through a low data rate connection with Earth.

Communications infrastructure is vital to any mission. As Parker journeys ever closer to the center of our solar system, each byte of downlinked data will provide new insight into our Sun. It’s a mission that continues a conversation between us and our star that has lasted many millions of years and will continue for many millions more.

For more information about NASA’s mission to touch the Sun: https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/parker-solar-probe

For more information about our satellite communications check out: http://nasa.gov/SCaN

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

Earth is special. 🌎 

It's the only place in the universe that we know contains life. Celebrate its beauty by taking a look at these breathtaking images of our home planet. 

Swirling white clouds, deep blue oceans, and multicolored landscapes come to life on the pages of our new photo essay "Earth," a collection of dramatic images captured by satellites.  Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

Look! A cosmic block party 🥳 In this Hubble image, you’ll find 50 spiral and dwarf galaxies hanging out in our cosmic neighborhood. The main focal point of stars is actually a dwarf galaxy. Dwarf galaxies often show a hazy structure, an ill-defined shape and an appearance somewhat akin to a swarm or cloud of stars — and UGC 685 is no exception to this. These data were gathered under Hubble’s Legacy ExtraGalactic UV Survey (LEGUS) program, the sharpest and most comprehensive ultraviolet survey of star-forming galaxies in the nearby universe. Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA; the LEGUS team, B. Tully, D. Calzetti

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

'Space Butterfly' Is Home to Hundreds of Baby Stars

What looks like a red butterfly in space is in reality a nursery for hundreds of baby stars, revealed in this infrared image from our Spitzer Space Telescope. Officially named Westerhout 40 (W40), the butterfly is a nebula — a giant cloud of gas and dust in space where new stars may form. The butterfly's two "wings" are giant bubbles of hot, interstellar gas blowing from the hottest, most massive stars in this region.

Besides being beautiful, W40 exemplifies how the formation of stars results in the destruction of the very clouds that helped create them. Inside giant clouds of gas and dust in space, the force of gravity pulls material together into dense clumps. Sometimes these clumps reach a critical density that allows stars to form at their cores. Radiation and winds coming from the most massive stars in those clouds — combined with the material spewed into space when those stars eventually explode — sometimes form bubbles like those in W40. But these processes also disperse the gas and dust, breaking up dense clumps and reducing or halting new star formation.

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