Boo-tiful Ring Galaxies

Solar System: Things to Know This Week

10 Tools for the Armchair Astronaut, or  How to Explore the Solar System from Home

At this very moment, spacecraft are surveying the solar system, from Mars, to Saturn, to Pluto and beyond. Now you can ride along to see the latest discoveries from deep space. For this week's edition of 10 Things, we've assembled a toolkit of 10 essential resources for the desktop astronaut.  

1. It's Like Facebook, but for Planets

Or is it more of a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Solar System? Whatever one calls it, our planets page offers quick rundowns, as well as in-depth guides, for all the major bodies in the solar system. Explore from the sun all the way to the Oort Cloud.

+ Peruse the planets + See how objects in the solar system stack up against each other

2. Keep Your Eyes on This One

If you still haven't tried Eyes on the Solar System, you're missing out. This free, downloadable simulation app lets you tour the planets and track the past, current and future positions of spacecraft--all in 3D. Eyes on the Solar System uses real NASA data to help you take a virtual flight across both space and time.

+ Prepare for departure

3. Dateline: Deep Space

With so much exploration underway, discoveries and new insights into the solar system come at a pace that borders on bewildering. NASA is rewriting the textbooks, literally, on a regular basis. Relax, though: there are several easy ways to stay up to date with what's happening in space.

+ See the latest headlines + Stay connected on social media: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram + Find more top NASA social media accounts

4. Space? There's an App for That

NASA offers phone and tablet apps for star gazing, pictures, news, 3D tours, satellite tracking, live NASA TV and many other kinds of info.

+ Start downloading + See other cool apps

5. A (Very) Long Distance Call

We’re in constant communication with spacecraft all over the solar system. The Deep Space Network is a global network of giant antenna dishes that makes it possible. With this online app, you can learn how it works -- and even see which spacecraft are phoning home right now.

+ Deep Space Network (DSN) Now

6. Collect 'Em All

Spacecraft 3D is an augmented reality (AR) application that 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. Print out the AR target and your camera will do the rest, making the spacecraft appear in 3D right in front of you. Learn more about these robotic explorers as they pop up on your desk, in your hand, or on your dog's head.

+ Download Spacecraft 3D + See more cool 3-D resources from NASA

7. Ever Wanted to Drive a Mars Rover?

This site will give you a 3D look at the Mars Curiosity rover, along with some of the terrain it has explored. It will even let you take the controls.

+ Experience Curiosity

8. More E-Ticket Attractions

But wait, there's more. NASA offers a variety of other fascinating (and free) online experiences, all based on actual data from real missions. Here are a few to explore:

+ Mars Trek + Vesta Trek + Moon Trek

9. The Universe Is Our Classroom

Studying the solar system makes for a compelling route into learning and teaching science, engineering and math. We have some great places to start.

+ Find resources for teachers + Build your own solar system with your classroom

10. Bring It on Home

After you've toured the far reaches of the solar system, you can always come home again. When you have spent time studying the harsh conditions on our neighboring planets, the charms of a unique paradise come into sharp focus, the place we call Earth.

+ Watch a real-time video feed from Earth orbit + See a daily global view of our planet from a million miles away + Hold the earth in your hands with the Earth Now mobile app

Discover more lists of 10 things to know about our solar system HERE.

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Jessica, first of all, I love you. Second, what's it like being a part of the first class that was 50% female?

Thank you!  The best part is that I think the fact that our class is 50% female simply reflects how far our society has come, and that is a great thing!  To us, there really is no difference on whether or not we are female or male, what backgrounds we come from, etc., we are one team, one family, all contributing to the same cause (which is an extraordinary feeling!).  I’m definitely very proud and honored to be part of the 21st astronaut class.

Moving at the Speed of Arctic Ice

Time-lapses taken from space can help track how Earth’s polar regions are changing, watching as glaciers retreat and accelerate, and ice sheets melt over decades.

Using our long data record and a new computer program, we can watch Alaskan glaciers shift and flow every year since 1972. Columbia Glacier, which was relatively stable in the 1970s, has since retreated rapidly as the climate continues to warm.

The Malaspina Glacier has pulsed and spread and pulsed again. The flashes and imperfect frames in these time-lapses result from the need for cloud-free images from each year, and the technology limitations of the early generation satellites.

In Greenland, glaciers are also reacting to the warming climate. Glaciers are essentially frozen rivers, flowing across land. As they get warmer, they flow faster and lose more ice to the ocean. On average, glaciers in Greenland have retreated about 3 miles between 1985 and 2018. The amount of ice loss was fairly consistent for the first 15 years of the record, but started increasing around 2000.

Warmer temperatures also affect Greenland farther inland, where the surface of ice sheets and glaciers melts, forming lakes that can be up to 3 miles across. Over the last 20 years, the number of meltwater lakes forming in Greenland increased 27% and appeared at higher elevations, where temperatures were previously too cold for melt.

Whether they're studying how ice flows into the water, or how water pools atop ice, scientists are investigating some of the many aspects of how climate affects Earth's polar regions. 

For more information, visit climate.nasa.gov.

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Seeing El Niño…From Space

First, What is El Niño?

This irregularly occurring weather phenomenon is created through an abnormality in wind and ocean circulation. When it originates in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. El Niño has wide-reaching effects. In a global context, it affects rainfall, ocean productivity, atmospheric gases and winds across continents. At a local level, it influences water supplies, fishing industries and food sources.

What About This Year’s El Niño

This winter, weather patterns may be fairly different than what is typical — all because of unusually warm ocean water in the east equatorial Pacific, aka El Niño. California is expected to get more rain while Australia is expected to get less. Since this El Niño began last summer, the Pacific Ocean has already experienced an increase in tropical storms and a decrease in phytoplankton.

How Do We See El Niño?

Here are some of El Niño’s key impacts and how we study them from space:

Rainfall: 

El Niño often spurs a change in rainfall patterns that can lead to major flooding, landslides and droughts across the globe.

How We Study It: Our Global Precipitation Measurement mission (GPM), tracks precipitation worldwide and creates global precipitation maps updated every half-hour using data from a host of satellites. Scientists can then use the data to study changes in rain and snow patterns. This gives us a better understanding of Earth’s climate and weather systems.

Hurricanes:

El Niño also influences the formation of tropical storms. El Niño events are associated with fewer hurricanes in the Atlantic, but more hurricanes and typhoons in the Pacific.

How We Study It: We have a suite of instruments in space that can study various aspects of storms, such as rainfall activity, cloud heights, surface wind speed and ocean heat.

Ocean Ecology:

While El Niño affects land, it also impacts the marine food web, which can be seen in the color of the ocean. The hue of the water is influenced by the presence of tiny plants, sediments and colored dissolved organic material. During El Niño conditions, upwelling is suppressed and the deep, nutrient-rich waters aren’t able to reach the surface, causing less phytoplankton productivity. With less food, the fish population declines, severely affecting fishing industries.

How We Study It: Our satellites measure the color of the ocean to derive surface chlorophyll, a pigment in phytoplankton, and observe lower total chlorophyll amounts during El Niño events in the equatorial Pacific Ocean.

Ozone:

El Niño also influences ozone — a compound that plays an important role in the Earth system and human health. When El Niño occurs, there is a substantial change in the major east-west tropical circulation, causing a significant redistribution of atmospheric gases like ozone.

How We Study It: Our Aura satellite is used to measure ozone concentrations in the upper layer of the atmosphere. With more than a decade of Aura data, researchers are able to separate the response of ozone concentrations to an El Niño from its response to change sin human activity, such as manmade fires.

Fires:

El Niño conditions shift patters of rainfall and fire across the tropics. During El Niño years, the number and intensity of fires increases, especially under drought conditions in regions accustomed to wet weather. These fires not only damage lands, but also emit greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere and contribute to global warming.

How We Study It: Our MODIS instruments on Aqua and Terra satellites provide a global picture of fire activity. MODIS was specifically designed to observe fires, allowing scientists to discern flaming from smoldering burns.

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Hello! Jeanette Epps here ready to take your @nasa questions!

Studying Storms from Air and Space

Technology we’ve developed is helping study the movement of storms.  

From satellites that can slice through a hurricane with 3-D vision to computer models of gale force winds, scientists now have unprecedented ways of viewing extreme weather.

This August, we’re sending an unmanned aircraft called a Global Hawk to study hurricanes. This mission is called the “East Pacific Origins and Characteristics of Hurricanes,” or EPOCH. It will fly over developing tropical storms to investigate how they progress and intensify. 

The three instruments aboard this Global Hawk aircraft will map out 3-D patterns of temperature, pressure, humidity, precipitation and wind speed as well as the role of the East Pacific Ocean in global cyclone formation. These measurements will help scientists better understand the processes that control storm intensity and the role of the East Pacific Ocean in global cyclone formation.

To better understand hurricane formation and intensity, scientists also utilize models and other observations.

Satellites such as our Global Precipitation Measurement Mission, or GPM, and computer models can analyze key stages of storm intensification.  

In September 2016, GPM captured Hurricane Matthew’s development from a Category 1 to Category 5 hurricane in less than 24 hours.  

Extreme rainfall was seen in several stages of the storm, causing significant flooding and landslides when it passed by Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

By combining model and observed data, scientists can analyze storms like never before. They can also better understand how hurricanes and other powerful storms can potentially impact society.

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

Infrared is Beautiful

Why was James Webb Space Telescope designed to observe infrared light? How can its images hope to compare to those taken by the (primarily) visible-light Hubble Space Telescope? The short answer is that Webb will absolutely capture beautiful images of the universe, even if it won’t see exactly what Hubble sees. (Spoiler: It will see a lot of things even better.)

The James Webb Space Telescope, or Webb, is our upcoming infrared space observatory, which will launch in 2019. It will spy the first luminous objects that formed in the universe and shed light on how galaxies evolve, how stars and planetary systems are born, and how life could form on other planets.

What is infrared light? 

This may surprise you, but your remote control uses light waves just beyond the visible spectrum of light—infrared light waves—to change channels on your TV.

Infrared light shows us how hot things are. It can also show us how cold things are. But it all has to do with heat. Since the primary source of infrared radiation is heat or thermal radiation, any object that has a temperature radiates in the infrared. Even objects that we think of as being very cold, such as an ice cube, emit infrared.

There are legitimate scientific reasons for Webb to be an infrared telescope. There are things we want to know more about, and we need an infrared telescope to learn about them. Things like: stars and planets being born inside clouds of dust and gas; the very first stars and galaxies, which are so far away the light they emit has been stretched into the infrared; and the chemical fingerprints of elements and molecules in the atmospheres of exoplanets, some of which are only seen in the infrared.

In a star-forming region of space called the 'Pillars of Creation,' this is what we see with visible light:

And this is what we see with infrared light:

Infrared light can pierce through obscuring dust and gas and unveil a more unfamiliar view.

Webb will see some visible light: red and orange. But the truth is that even though Webb sees mostly infrared light, it will still take beautiful images. The beauty and quality of an astronomical image depends on two things: the sharpness of the image and the number of pixels in the camera. On both of these counts, Webb is very similar to, and in many ways better than, Hubble. Webb will take much sharper images than Hubble at infrared wavelengths, and Hubble has comparable resolution at the visible wavelengths that Webb can see.

Webb’s infrared data can be translated by computer into something our eyes can appreciate – in fact, this is what we do with Hubble data. The gorgeous images we see from Hubble don’t pop out of the telescope looking fully formed. To maximize the resolution of the images, Hubble takes multiple exposures through different color filters on its cameras.

The separate exposures, which look black and white, are assembled into a true color picture via image processing. Full color is important to image analysis of celestial objects. It can be used to highlight the glow of various elements in a nebula, or different stellar populations in a galaxy. It can also highlight interesting features of the object that might be overlooked in a black and white exposure, and so the images not only look beautiful but also contain a lot of useful scientific information about the structure, temperatures, and chemical makeup of a celestial object.

This image shows the sequences in the production of a Hubble image of nebula Messier 17:

Here’s another compelling argument for having telescopes that view the universe outside the spectrum of visible light – not everything in the universe emits visible light. There are many phenomena which can only be seen at certain wavelengths of light, for example, in the X-ray part of the spectrum, or in the ultraviolet. When we combine images taken at different wavelengths of light, we can get a better understanding of an object, because each wavelength can show us a different feature or facet of it. 

Just like infrared data can be made into something meaningful to human eyes, so can each of the other wavelengths of light, even X-rays and gamma-rays.

Below is an image of the M82 galaxy created using X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope, and visible light data from Hubble. Also note how aesthetically pleasing the image is despite it not being just optical light:

Though Hubble sees primarily visible light, it can see some infrared. And despite not being optimized for it, and being much less powerful than Webb, it still produced this stunning image of the Horsehead Nebula.

It’s a big universe out there – more than our eyes can see. But with all the telescopes now at our disposal (as well as the new ones that will be coming online in the future), we are slowly building a more accurate picture. And it’s definitely a beautiful one. Just take a look...

…At this Spitzer infrared image of a shock wave in dust around the star Zeta Ophiuchi.

…this Spitzer image of the Helix Nebula, created using infrared data from the telescope and ultraviolet data from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer.

…this image of the “wing” of the Small Magellanic Cloud, created with infrared data from Spitzer and X-ray data from Chandra.

...the below image of the Milky Way’s galactic center, taken with our flying SOFIA telescope. It flies at more than 40,000 feet, putting it above 99% of the  water vapor in Earth's atmosphere-- critical for observing infrared because water vapor blocks infrared light from reaching the ground. This infrared view reveals the ring of gas and dust around a supermassive black hole that can't be seen with visible light. 

…and this Hubble image of the Mystic Mountains in the Carina Nebula.

Learn more about the James Webb Space Telescope HERE, or follow the mission on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Image Credits Eagle Nebula: NASA, ESA/Hubble and the Hubble Heritage Team Hubble Image Processing - Messier 17: NASA/STScI Galaxy M82 Composite Image: NASA, CXC, JHU, D.Strickland, JPL-Caltech, C. Engelbracht (University of Arizona), ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Horsehead Nebula: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Zeta Ophiuchi: NASA/JPL-Caltech Helix Nebula: NASA/JPL-Caltech Wing of the Small Magellanic Cloud X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ.Potsdam/L.Oskinova et al; Optical: NASA/STScI; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech Milky Way Circumnuclear Ring: NASA/DLR/USRA/DSI/FORCAST Team/ Lau et al. 2013 Mystic Mountains in the Carina Nebula: NASA/ESA/M. Livio & Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI)

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View these celestial beauties taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released as a set of views in a modern day "Messier Catalog." 

Spotting comets was all the rage in the middle of the 18th century, and at the forefront of the comet hunt was a young French astronomer named Charles Messier. In 1774, in an effort to help fellow comet seekers steer clear of astronomical objects that were not comets (something that frustrated his own search for these elusive entities), Messier published the first version of his “Catalog of Nebulae and Star Clusters,” a collection of celestial objects that weren’t comets and should be avoided during comet hunting. Today, rather than avoiding these objects, many amateur astronomers actively seek them out as interesting targets to observe with backyard telescopes, binoculars or sometimes even with the naked eye.

Hubble’s version of the Messier catalog includes eight newly processed images never before released by NASA. The images were extracted from more than 1.3 million observations that now reside in the Hubble data archive. Some of these images represent the first Hubble views of the objects, while others include newer, higher resolution images taken with Hubble’s latest cameras.

Learn more: https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/hubble-s-messier-catalog

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The return of the Dragon 🐉

One month ago, SpaceX’s Dragon capsule arrived at the International Space Station. Now it’s time for the Dragon to come home. The return trip, a crucial part of its mission, brings scientific hardware, data and experiments down to waiting researchers.

Check out a few of the pieces of research taking that ride back to Earth.

A cinematic look at life and science aboard the space station

You may one day get to experience the product of The ISS Experience. A team is creating a cinematic virtual reality (VR) film from footage taken during in space covering crew life, execution of science and the international partnerships involved on the space station.

Every week or so, footage is transferred from the camera onto solid state drives – an original and a backup – for storage and downlinking. One of each pair of drives returns to Earth for editing and production.

Seeking Alzheimer’s understanding in microgravity

Amyloid fibrils, a conglomeration of proteins that can build up in the body, are associated with a number of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. The Amyloid Aggregation investigation assesses whether microgravity affects formation of these fibrils.

Samples exposed to microgravity are coming back to Earth using a facility that maintains a chilly temperature of -20°C. Teams on the ground must quickly retrieve the equipment and keep the samples at -20°C until they are analyzed.

The SPHERES return home

Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites, or SPHERES, are bowling-ball sized satellites used to study formation flying, control algorithms and material science.

First sent to the station in 2006, these satellites have been employed in a dozen different investigations.

The Dragon brings back hardware from two recent experiments that examined the behavior of fluids in microgravity, SPHERES Tether Slosh and SPHERES-Slosh.

From microgravity lab to manufacturing facility

The Fiber Optic Production investigation created optical fibers on the space station using a blend of materials called ZBLAN to see whether making the fibers in microgravity has advantages over the process used on Earth. ZBLAN optical fibers offer high bandwidth for the telecommunications industry, and potential applications for uses like laser surgery and environmental monitoring.

The fiber produced on the space station is coming to Earth for testing to help verify previous studies and guide future efforts to manufacture large volumes of such fiber in microgravity.

Read more about the science returning on Dragon here!

For daily updates, follow @ISS_Research, Space Station Research and Technology News or our Facebook. Follow the ISS National Lab for information on its sponsored investigations. For opportunities to see the space station pass over your town, check out Spot the Station.

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I am interested in learning how to grow plants in space. How can I be involved in this as a college student, or independently?