Rocket Launches And Rising Seas

The One-Year Mission

First off, what is the One-Year Crew? Obviously, they’re doing something for a year, but what, and why?

Two crew members on the International Space Station have just met the halfway point of their year in space. NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian Cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko are living in space for 342 days and will help us better understand the effects of microgravity on the human body.

Why 342 days and not 365? Thought you might ask. Due to crew rotation schedules, which involve training timelines and dictate when launches and landings occur, the mission was confined to 342 days. Plenty of time to conduct great research though!

The studies performed throughout their stay will yield beneficial knowledge on the medical, psychological and biomedical challenges faced by astronauts during long-duration spaceflight.

The weightlessness of the space environment has various effects on the human body, including: Fluid shifts that cause changes in vision, rapid bone loss, disturbances to sensorimotor ability, weakened muscles and more.

The goal of the One-Year Mission is to understand and minimize these effects on humans while in space.

The Twins Study

A unique investigation that is being conducted during this year in space is the Twins Study. NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly’s twin brother Mark Kelly will spend the year on Earth while Scott is in space. Since their genetic makeup is as close to identical as we can get, this allows a unique research perspective. We can now compare all of the results from Scott Kelly in space to his brother Mark on Earth.

But why are we studying all of this? If we want to move forward with our journey to Mars and travel into deep space, astronauts will need to live in microgravity for long periods of time. In order to mitigate the effects of long duration spaceflight on the human body, we need to understand the causes. The One-Year mission hopes to find these answers.

Halfway Point

Today, September 15 marks the halfway point of their year in space, and they now enter the final stretch of their mission. 

Here are a few fun tidbits on human spaceflight to put things in perspective:

1) Scott Kelly has logged 180 days in space on his three previous flights, two of which were Space Shuttle missions. 

2) The American astronaut with the most cumulative time in space is Mkie Fincke, with 382 days in space on three flights. Kelly will surpass this record for most cumulative time in space by a U.S. astronaut on October 16.

3) Kelly will pass Mike Lopez-Alegria’s mark for most time on a single spaceflight (215 days) on October 29.

4) By the end of this one-year mission, Kelly will have traveled for 342 days, made 5,472 orbits and traveled 141.7 million miles in a single mission. 

Have you seen the amazing images that Astronaut Scott Kelly has shared during the first half of his year in space? Check out this collection, and also follow him on social media to see what he posts for the duration of his #YearInSpace: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. 

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

Solar System: Top 5 Things to Know This Week

1. A Ceres of Fortunate Events

Our Dawn mission continues its exploration at Ceres, and the team is working with the data coming back to Earth, looking for explanations for the tiny world’s strange features. Follow Dawn’s expedition HERE.

2. Icy Moon Rendezvous

One of the most interesting places in the entire solar system is Saturn’s moon Enceladus, with its underground ocean and spectacular geyser plume. This month, the Cassini spacecraft will be buzzing close by Enceladus several times, the last such encounters of the mission. On October 14, Cassini will perform a targeted flyby at a distance of just 1,142 miles (1,838 kilometers) over the moon’s northern latitudes. Ride along with Cassini HERE.

3. Make Your Own Mars Walkabout

You can retrace Opportunity’s journey, see where the Curiosity rover is now, or even follow along with fictional astronaut Mark Watney from The Martian movie using the free online app MarsTrek. The app lets you zoom in on almost any part of the planet and see images obtained by our spacecraft, so you can plan your on Red Planet excursion. Take a hike HERE.

4. Elusive Features on Jupiter

New imagery from our Hubble Space Telescope is capturing details never before seen on Jupiter. High-resolution maps and spinning globes, rendered in the 4K Ultra HD format, reveal an elusive wave and changes to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. Explore Jupiter HERE.

5. Mr. Blue Sky

Another week, another amazing picture from Pluto. The first color images of Pluto’s atmospheric hazes, returned by our New Horizons spacecraft last week, reveal that the hazes are blue. Who would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper Belt? Most of the data collected during July’s Pluto flyby remains aboard the spacecraft, but the team publishes new batches of pictures and other findings on a weekly basis. Keep up with the latest HERE.

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

NASA’s Fleet of Planet-hunters and World-explorers

Around every star there could be at least one planet, so we’re bound to find one that is rocky, like Earth, and possibly suitable for life. While we’re not quite to the point where we can zoom up and take clear snapshots of the thousands of distant worlds we’ve found outside our solar system, there are ways we can figure out what exoplanets light years away are made of, and if they have signs of basic building blocks for life. Here are a few current and upcoming missions helping us explore new worlds:

Kepler

Launched in 2009, the Kepler space telescope searched for planets by looking for telltale dips in a star’s brightness caused by crossing, or transiting, planets. It has confirmed more than 1,000 planets; of these, fewer than 20 are Earth-size (therefore possibly rocky) and in the habitable zone -- the area around a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of an orbiting planet. Astronomers using Kepler data found the first Earth-sized planet orbiting in the habitable zone of its star and one in the habitable zone of a sun-like star.

In May 2013, a second pointing wheel on the spacecraft broke, making it not stable enough to continue its original mission. But clever engineers and scientists got to work, and in May 2014, Kepler took on a new job as the K2 mission. K2 continues the search for other worlds but has introduced new opportunities to observe star clusters, young and old stars, active galaxies and supernovae.

Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)

Revving up for launch around 2017-2018, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will find new planets the same way Kepler does, but right in the stellar backyard of our solar system while covering 400 times the sky area. It plans to monitor 200,000 bright, nearby stars for planets, with a focus on finding Earth and Super-Earth-sized planets. 

Once we’ve narrowed down the best targets for follow-up, astronomers can figure out what these planets are made of, and what’s in the atmosphere. One of the ways to look into the atmosphere is through spectroscopy.  

As a planet passes between us and its star, a small amount of starlight is absorbed by the gas in the planet’s atmosphere. This leaves telltale chemical “fingerprints” in the star’s light that astronomers can use to discover the chemical composition of the atmosphere, such as methane, carbon dioxide, or water vapor. 

James Webb Space Telescope

Launching in 2018, NASA’s most powerful telescope to date, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), will not only be able to search for planets orbiting distant stars, its near-infrared multi-object spectrograph will split infrared light into its different colors- spectrum- providing scientists with information about an physical properties about an exoplanet’s atmosphere, including temperature, mass, and chemical composition. 

Hubble Space Telescope

Hubble Space Telescope is better than ever after 25 years of science, and has found evidence for atmospheres bleeding off exoplanets very close to their stars, and even provided thermal maps of exoplanet atmospheres. Hubble holds the record for finding the farthest exoplanets discovered to date, located 26,000 light-years away in the hub of our Milky Way galaxy.

Chandra X-ray Observatory

Chandra X-ray Observatory can detect exoplanets passing in front of their parent stars. X-ray observations can also help give clues on an exoplanet’s atmosphere and magnetic fields. It has observed an exoplanet that made its star act much older than it actually is. 

Spitzer Space Telescope

Spitzer Space Telescope has been unveiling hidden cosmic objects with its dust-piercing infrared vision for more than 12 years. It helped pioneer the study of atmospheres and weather on large, gaseous exoplanets. Spitzer can help narrow down the sizes of exoplanets, and recently confirmed the closest known rocky planet to Earth.

SOFIA

The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is an airplane mounted with an infrared telescope that can fly above more than 99 percent of Earth's atmospheric water vapor. Unlike most space observatories, SOFIA can be routinely upgraded and repaired. It can look at planetary-forming systems and has recently observed its first exoplanet transit. 

What’s Coming Next?

Analyzing the chemical makeup of Earth-sized, rocky planets with thin atmospheres is a big challenge, since smaller planets are incredibly faint compared to their stars. One solution is to block the light of the planets' glaring stars so that we can directly see the reflected light of the planets. Telescope instruments called coronagraphs use masks to block the starlight while letting the planet's light pass through. Another possible tool is a large, flower-shaped structure known as the starshade. This structure would fly in tandem with a space telescope to block the light of a star before it enters the telescope. 

All images (except SOFIA) are artist illustrations.

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

Colors of Earth

When we think of our globe from a distance, we generally visualize two colors: blue and green. Water and land. Mostly water, consequently, our planet’s nickname of the blue marble.

Traveling around the globe every 90 minutes covering millions of miles with a focused lens on our beautiful planet from 250 miles above, I’ve captured many beautiful colors beyond blue and green that showcase Earth in new and interesting ways. Some colors are indicative of nature like desert sands and weather like snow. Other colors tell stories of Earth’s climate in bright splashes of yellows and greens of pollen and muted grey tones and clouded filters of pollution.

Blue and green still remain vivid and beautiful colors on Earth from the vantage point of the International Space Station, but here are some other colors that have caught my eye from my orbital perspective.

African violet

Bahamas blues

Tropical in Africa

Yellow desert

Orange in Egypt

Red surprise 

Snow white 

Follow my Year In Space on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram! 

Are You Up to the Task of Navigating Space with NASA?

We’re committed to exploration and discovery, journeying to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. But how do we guide our missions on their voyage among the stars? Navigation engineers lead the way!

Using complex mathematical formulas, navigation experts calculate where our spacecraft are and where they’re headed. No matter the destination, navigating the stars is a complicated challenge that faces all our missions. But, we think you’re up to the task!

Our space navigation workbook lets you explore the techniques and mathematical concepts used by navigation engineers. The book delves into groundbreaking navigation innovations like miniaturized atomic clocks, autonomous navigation technologies, using GPS signals at the Moon, and guiding missions through the solar system with X-ray emissions from pulsars — a type of neutron star. It also introduces you to experts working with NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation program at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

If you’re a high schooler who dreams of guiding a rover across the rocky surface of Mars or planning the trajectory of an observer swinging around Venus en route to the Sun, this workbook is for you! Download it today and start your adventure with NASA: https://go.nasa.gov/3i7Pzqr

Top 10 Star Trek Planets Chosen by Our Scientists

What would happen if the crew of the Starship Enterprise handed over the controls to our scientists and engineers? It turns out many are avid Star Trek fans with lengthy itineraries in mind.

1. Vulcan

What is perhaps the most famous Star Trek planet was placed by creator Gene Roddenberry in a real star system: 40 Eridani. This trinary system of three dwarf stars, about 16 light-years from Earth, could play host to exoplanets; none have been detected there so far. The most massive is 40 Eridani A, chosen as Vulcan’s sun.

2. Andoria

An icy “M-class” (Star Trek's term for “Earth-like”) moon of a much larger planet—a gas giant—that is home to soft-spoken humanoids with blue skin, white hair and stylish antennae. In our solar system, gas giants play host to icy moons, such as Jupiter’s Europa or Saturn’s Enceladus, that possess subsurface oceans locked inside shells of ice. Our missions are searching for lifeforms that might exist in these cold, dark habitats.

3. Risa

Another Trek M-class planet known for its engineered tropical climate and its welcoming humanoid population.  The planet is said to orbit a binary, or double, star system—in Star Trek fan lore, Epsilon Ceti, a real star system some 79 light-years from Earth. The first discovery of a planet around a binary was Kepler-16b, which is cold, gaseous and Saturn-sized.

4. “Shore Leave” planet, Omicron Delta region

This is another amusement park of a planet, where outlandish characters are manufactured in underground factories straight from the crew members’ imaginations. In real life, astronauts aboard the International Space Station print out plastic tools and containers with their own 3-D printer.

5. Nibiru

“Star Trek: Into Darkness” finds Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy fleeing from chalk-skinned aliens through a red jungle. Red or even black vegetation could exist on real planets that orbit cooler, redder stars, an adaptation meant to gather as much light for photosynthesis as possible. An example may be Kepler-186f, a planet only 10 percent larger than Earth in diameter. At high noon, the surface of this planet would look something like dusk on Earth.

6. Wolf 359

A star best known in the Star Trek universe as the site of a fierce battle in which a multitude of “Star Trek: Next Generation” ships are defeated by the Borg. But Wolf 359 is a real star, one of the closest to Earth at a distance of 7.8 light-years. Wolf 359 is also a likely observational target for the Kepler space telescope in the upcoming Campaign 14 of its “K2” mission.

7. Eminiar VII/Vendikar

These two planets are neighbors, sharing a star system. So, of course, they’ve been at war for centuries. While we have no signs of interplanetary war, multiple rocky worlds have been discovered orbiting single stars. A cool dwarf star called TRAPPIST-1 is orbited by three Earth-size planets; two have a chance of being the right temperature for liquid water, with possible Earth-like atmospheres.

8. Remus

The planets Romulus and Remus are home to the Romulan Empire (ancient Rome, anyone?), although Remus seemed to have gotten the raw end of the deal. Remus is tidally locked, one face always turned to its star. Tidally locked worlds might well be a real thing, with many possible candidates discovered with our Kepler space telescope. The habitable portion of the surface of such planets might be confined to a band between the day and night sides called the “terminator zone”—a.k.a. the twilight zone.

9. Janus VI

A rocky world lacking an atmosphere, perhaps similar to Mars. While humans must maintain an artificial underground environment to survive, the innards of the planet are a comfortable home to an alien species known as the “Horta.” Their rock-like biochemistry is based on silicon, rather than carbon, inspiring us to imagine the many forms life might take in the universe.

10. Earth

In the Star Trek universe, Earth is home to Starfleet Headquarters; the real Earth is, at least so far, the only life-bearing world we know. No true Earth analogs have been discovered among the real exoplanets detected so far. But a new generation of space telescopes, designed to capture direct images of exoplanets in Earth’s size range, might one day reveal an alternative “pale blue dot.”

Learn more about exoplanets at: exoplanets.nasa.gov

Link to full article: https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/news/1378/top-10-star-trek-destinations-chosen-by-nasa-scientists/

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

Questions coming up from….

@Dee-an-ugh-deactivated20210528: My 4-year-old is already interested in space. How can I nurture her interest the older she gets in a productive way

@marvelpjostarwarsobssessed: What inspired/caused your interest in space?

@Anonymous: Do you like your job?

Solar System: 5 Things To Know This Week

Our solar system is huge, so let us break it down for you. Here are 5 things to know this week: 

1. You Call the Shots

This July, when the Juno mission arrives at Jupiter, it will eye the massive planet with JunoCam. What adds extra interest to this mission is that the public is invited to help Juno scientists choose which images JunoCam will take. Now is the time to get involved.

2. Dawn Delivers

We've seen several images now from the Dawn spacecraft's new, close orbit around Ceres—and they don't disappoint. Exquisitely detailed photos of the dwarf planet reveal craters, cliffs, fractures, canyons and bright spots in many locations. "Everywhere we look in these new low-altitude observations, we see amazing landforms that speak to the unique character of this most amazing world," said the mission's principal investigator.

3. Remembering the Visit to a Sideways World

Jan. 24 is the 30th anniversary of Voyager 2's Uranus flyby. The seventh planet is notable for the extreme tilt of its axis, its lacy ring system and its large family of moons—10 of which were discovered thanks to Voyager's close encounter. In fact, we learned much of what we know about the Uranian system during those few days in 1986.

4. A Decade in the Deep

The New Horizons spacecraft left Earth 10 years ago this week. Its long voyage into deep space is, even now, transforming our understanding of the outer solar system. New data and pictures from the Pluto flyby are still streaming down from the spacecraft. Pending the approval of an extended mission, New Horizons is en route to a 2019 rendezvous with a small, unexplored world in the distant Kuiper Belt.

5. Power at a Distance

Space exploration helped drive the development of practical solar cells, and now solar power has gone farther than ever before. Last week, NASA's Juno spacecraft broke the record for the most distant solar-powered craft when it passed a distance of 493 million miles (793 million kilometers) from the sun. The four-ton Juno spacecraft draws energy from three 30-foot-long (9-meter) solar arrays festooned with 18,698 individual cells.

Want to learn more? Read our full list of the 10 things to know this week about the solar system HERE. 

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

Things That Go Bump in the Gamma Rays

Some people watch scary movies because they like being startled. A bad guy jumps out from around a corner! A monster emerges from the shadows! Scientists experience surprises all the time, but they’re usually more excited than scared. Sometimes theories foreshadow new findings — like when there’s a dramatic swell in the movie soundtrack — but often, discoveries are truly unexpected. 

Scientists working with the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope have been jumping to study mysterious bumps in the gamma rays for a decade now. Gamma rays are the highest-energy form of light. Invisible to human eyes, they’re created by some of the most powerful and unusual events and objects in the universe. In celebration of Halloween, here are a few creepy gamma-ray findings from Fermi’s catalog.

Stellar Graveyards

If you were to walk through a cemetery at night, you’d expect to trip over headstones or grave markers. Maybe you’d worry about running into a ghost. If you could explore the stellar gravesite created when a star explodes as a supernova, you’d find a cloud of debris expanding into interstellar space. Some of the chemical elements in that debris, like gold and platinum, go on to create new stars and planets! Fermi found that supernova remnants IC 443 and W44 also accelerate mysterious cosmic rays, high-energy particles moving at nearly the speed of light. As the shockwave of the supernova expands, particles escape its magnetic field and interact with non-cosmic-ray particles to produce gamma rays. 

Ghost Particles

But the sources of cosmic rays aren’t the only particle mysteries Fermi studies. Just this July, Fermi teamed up with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica to discover the first source of neutrinos outside our galactic neighborhood. Neutrinos are particles that weigh almost nothing and rarely interact with anything. Around a trillion of them pass through you every second, ghost-like, without you noticing and then continue on their way. (But don’t worry, like a friendly ghost, they don’t harm you!) Fermi traced the neutrino IceCube detected back to a supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy. By the time it reached Earth, it had traveled for 3.7 billion years at almost the speed of light!

Black Widow Pulsars

Black widows and redbacks are species of spiders with a reputation for devouring their partners. Astronomers have discovered two types of star systems that behave in a similar way. Sometimes when a star explodes as a supernova, it collapses back into a rapidly spinning, incredibly dense star called a pulsar. If there’s a lighter star nearby, it can get stuck in a close orbit with the pulsar, which blasts it with gamma rays, magnetic fields and intense winds of energetic particles. All these combine to blow clouds of material off the low-mass star. Eventually, the pulsar can eat away at its companion entirely.

Dark Matter

What’s scarier than a good unsolved mystery? Dark matter is a little-understood substance that makes up most of the matter in the universe. The stuff that we can see — stars, people, haunted houses, candy — is made up of normal matter. But our surveys of the cosmos tell us there’s not enough normal matter to keep things working the way they do. There must be another type of matter out there holding everything together. One of Fermi’s jobs is to help scientists narrow down the search for dark matter. Last year, researchers noticed that most of the gamma rays coming from the Andromeda galaxy are confined to its center instead of being spread throughout. One possible explanation is that accumulated dark matter at the center of the galaxy is emitting gamma rays!

Fermi has helped us learn a lot about the gamma-ray universe over the last 10 years. Learn more about its accomplishments and the other mysteries it’s working to solve. What other surprises are waiting out among the stars?

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

From Seed to Market: How NASA brings food to the table

Did you know we help farmers grow some of your favorite fruits, veggies and grains?

Our Earth-observing satellites track rainfall amounts, soil moisture, crop health, and more. On the ground, we partner with agencies and organizations around the world to help farmers use that data to care for their fields.

Here are a few ways we help put food on the table, from planting to harvest.

Planting

Did you plant seeds in science class to watch them sprout and grow? They all needed water, right? Our data helps farmers “see” how moist the soil is across large fields.

“When you’re not sure when to water your flowers or your garden, you can look at the soil or touch it with your hands. We are sort of ‘feeling’ the soil, sensing how much water is in the soil – from a satellite,

685 kilometers (408 miles) above Earth,” said John Bolten, the associate program manager of water resources for NASA’s Applied Sciences Program.

This spring, we worked with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and George Mason University to release Crop-CASMA, a tool that shows soil moisture and vegetation conditions for the United States. Able to see smaller areas – about the size of a couple of golf courses – the USDA uses Crop-CASMA to help update farmers on their state’s soil moisture, crop health and growing progress.

Growing

It’s dangerous being a seedling.

Heavy spring rains or summer storms can flood fields and drown growing plants. Dry spells and droughts can starve them of nutrients. Insects and hail can damage them. Farmers need to keep a close eye on plants during the spring and summer months. Our data and programs help them do that.

For example, in California, irrigation is essential for agriculture. California’s Central Valley annually produces more than 250 types of crops and is one of the most productive agricultural regions in the country – but it’s dry. Some parts only get 6 inches of rain per year.

To help, Landsat data powers CropManage – an app that tells farmers how long to irrigate their fields, based on soil conditions and evapotranspiration, or how much water plants are releasing into the atmosphere. The warmer and drier the atmosphere, the more plants “sweat” and lose water that needs to be replenished. Knowing how long to irrigate helps farmers conserve water and be more efficient. In years like 2021, intense droughts can make water management especially critical.

Harvest

Leading up to harvest, farmers need to know their expected yields – and profits.

GEOGLAM, or the Group on Earth Observations Global Agricultural Monitoring Initiative, is a partnership between NASA Harvest, USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) and other global agencies to track and report on crop conditions around the world.

USDA FAS is one of the main users of a soil moisture measurement product developed by Bolten and his team at our NASA Goddard Space Flight Center to drive their crop forecasting system.

If you’re interested in more ways we support agriculture, stay tuned over the next few weeks to learn more about how satellites (and scientists) help put snacks on your table!

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!