The Adventures Of Commander Moonikin Campos

Prepare to be mesmerized… 😵‍💫

Feast your eyes on the magnificent galaxy M51, also known as the Whirlpool Galaxy! This hypnotic spiral galaxy was captured in visible light with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. Living up to its nickname, the Whirlpool Galaxy has the traits of a typical spiral galaxy, like beautifully curving arms, pink star-forming regions, and brilliant blue strands of star clusters.

The Whirlpool Galaxy is located about 31 million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici.

Discover more about the Whirlpool Galaxy here.

Right now, the Hubble Space Telescope is exploring #GalaxiesGalore! Find more galaxy content and spectacular new images by following along on Hubble’s Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Credit: NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Our future Mars 2020 rover, seen here as imagined through the eyes of an artist, will search for signs of past microbial life. The mission will take the next step in exploring the Red Planet by not only seeking signs of habitable conditions on Mars in the ancient past, but also searching for signs of past microbial life itself. 

The Mars 2020 rover introduces a drill that can collect core samples of the most promising rocks and soils and set them aside on the surface of Mars. A future mission could potentially return these samples to Earth. Mars 2020 is targeted for launch in July/August 2020, aboard an Atlas V 541 rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Learn more.

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I've been very curious about the basis on which the landing site is decided! I read that it will land in the Jerezo crater, so is there a particular reason behind choosing that place for the landing?

Cosmic Couples and Devastating Breakups

Relationships can be complicated — especially if you’re a pair of stars. Sometimes you start a downward spiral you just can’t get out of, eventually crash together and set off an explosion that can be seen 130 million light-years away.

For Valentine’s Day, we’re exploring the bonds between some of the universe’s peculiar pairs … as well as a few of their cataclysmic endings.

Stellar Couples

When you look at a star in the night sky, you may really be viewing two or more stars dancing around each other. Scientists estimate three or four out of every five Sun-like stars in the Milky Way have at least one partner. Take our old north star Thuban, for example. It’s a binary, or two-star, system in the constellation Draco.

Alpha Centauri, our nearest stellar neighbor, is actually a stellar triangle. Two Sun-like stars, Rigil Kentaurus and Toliman, form a pair (called Alpha Centauri AB) that orbit each other about every 80 years. Proxima Centauri is a remote red dwarf star caught in their gravitational pull even though it sits way far away from them (like over 300 times the distance between the Sun and Neptune).

Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2/Davide De Martin/Mahdi Zamani

Sometimes, though, a stellar couple ends its relationship in a way that’s really disastrous for one of them. A black widow binary, for example, contains a low-mass star, called a brown dwarf, and a rapidly spinning, superdense stellar corpse called a pulsar. The pulsar generates intense radiation and particle winds that blow away the material of the other star over millions to billions of years.

Black Hole Beaus

In romance novels, an air of mystery is essential for any love interest, and black holes are some of the most mysterious phenomena in the universe. They also have very dramatic relationships with other objects around them!

Scientists have observed two types of black holes. Supermassive black holes are hundreds of thousands to billions of times our Sun’s mass. One of these monsters, called Sagittarius A* (the “*” is pronounced “star”), sits at the center of our own Milky Way. In a sense, our galaxy and its black hole are childhood sweethearts — they’ve been together for over 13 billion years! All the Milky-Way-size galaxies we’ve seen so far, including our neighbor Andromeda (pictured below), have supermassive black holes at their center!

These black-hole-galaxy power couples sometimes collide with other, similar pairs — kind of like a disastrous double date! We’ve never seen one of these events happen before, but scientists are starting to model them to get an idea of what the resulting fireworks might look like.

One of the most dramatic and fleeting relationships a supermassive black hole can have is with a star that strays too close. The black hole’s gravitational pull on the unfortunate star causes it to bulge on one side and break apart into a stream of gas, which is called a tidal disruption event.

The other type of black hole you often hear about is stellar-mass black holes, which are five to tens of times the Sun’s mass. Scientists think these are formed when a massive star goes supernova. If there are two massive stars in a binary, they can leave behind a pair of black holes that are tied together by their gravity. These new black holes spiral closer and closer until they crash together and create a larger black hole. The National Science Foundation’s LIGO project has detected many of these collisions through ripples in space-time called gravitational waves.

Credit: LIGO/T. Pyle

Here’s hoping your Valentine’s Day is more like a peacefully spiraling stellar binary and less like a tidal disruption! Learn how to have a safe relationship of your own with black holes here.

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Earth’s Hot and It’s Cold 🎶(and We Can Tell from Space)

From people and pets to pens and pencils, everything gives off energy in the form of heat. We’ve got special instruments that measure thermal wavelengths, so we can tell whether something is hot, cold or in between. Hotter things emit more thermal energy; colder ones emit less.

We have special instruments in space, zipping around Earth and measuring the hottest and coldest places on our planet.

We can also measure much subtler changes in heat – like when plants cool down as they take up water from the soil and ‘sweat’ it out into the air, in a process called evapotranspiration.

This lets us identify healthy, growing crops around the world.

The instrument that can do all this is called the Thermal Infrared Sensor 2 (TIRS-2). It just passed a series of rigorous tests at our Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., proving it’s ready to survive in space.

TIRS-2 is bound for the Landsat 9 satellite, which will continue decades of work studying our planet from space.

 Learn more about TIRS-2 and how we see heat from space: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/new-landsat-infrared-instrument-ships-from-nasa/.

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Solar System: 5 Things to Know This Week

From Mars to the asteroid belt to Saturn, our hardworking space robots are exploring the solar system. These mechanical emissaries orbit distant worlds or rove across alien landscapes, going places that are too remote or too dangerous for people (for now).

We often show off the pictures that these spacecraft send home, but this week we’re turning that around: here are some of the best pictures of the space robots, taken by other robots (or themselves), in deep space.

1. So Selfless with the Selfies

The Mars Curiosity rover makes breathtaking panoramas of the Martian landscape — and looks good doing it. This mission is famous for the remarkable self portraits of its robotic geologist in action. See more Martian selfies HERE. You can also try this draggable 360 panorama HERE. Find out how the rover team makes these images HERE.

2. Two Spaceships Passing in the Moonlight

In a feat of timing on Jan. 14, 2014, our Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter caught a snapshot of LADEE, another robotic spacecraft that was orbiting the moon at the time. LADEE zoomed past at a distance of only about five miles below.

3. Bon Voyage, Galileo

The history-making Galileo mission to Jupiter set sail from the cargo bay of another spacecraft, Space Shuttle Atlantis, on Oct. 18, 1989. Get ready for Juno, which is the next spacecraft to arrive at Jupiter in July.

4. Cometary Close-Up

Using a camera on the Philae lander, the Rosetta spacecraft snapped an extraordinary self portrait at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko from a distance of about 10 miles. The image captures the side of Rosetta and one of its 14-meter-long solar wings, with the comet in the background. Learn more about Rosetta HERE.

5. Man and Machine

This snapshot captures a remarkable moment in the history of exploration: the one and only time a human met up in space with a robotic forerunner on location. The Surveyor 3 lander helped pave the way for the astronaut footsteps that came a few years later. See the story of Apollo 12 and this unique encounter HERE.

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

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8 Common Questions About Our James Webb Space Telescope

You might have heard the basics about our James Webb Space Telescope, or Webb, and still have lots more questions! Here are more advanced questions we are frequently asked. (If you want to know the basics, read this Tumblr first!)

Webb is our upcoming infrared space observatory, which will launch in 2021. 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.

1. Why is the mirror segmented? 

The James Webb Space Telescope has a 6.5-meter (21.3-foot) diameter mirror, made from 18 individual segments. Webb needs to have an unfolding mirror because the mirror is so large that it otherwise cannot fit in the launch shroud of currently available rockets.

The mirror has to be large in order to see the faint light from the first star-forming regions and to see very small details at infrared wavelengths. 

Designing, building, and operating a mirror that unfolds is one of the major technological developments of Webb. Unfolding mirrors will be necessary for future missions requiring even larger mirrors, and will find application in other scientific, civil, and military space missions.

2. Why are the mirrors hexagonal?

In short, the hexagonal shape allows a segmented mirror to be constructed with very small gaps, so the segments combine to form a roughly circular shape and need only three variations in prescription. If we had circular segments, there would be gaps between them.

Finally, we want a roughly circular overall mirror shape because that focuses the light into the most symmetric and compact region on the detectors. 

An oval mirror, for example, would give images that are elongated in one direction. A square mirror would send a lot of the light out of the central region.

3. Is there a danger from micrometeoroids?

A micrometeoroid is a particle smaller than a grain of sand. Most never reach Earth's surface because they are vaporized by the intense heat generated by the friction of passing through the atmosphere. In space, no blanket of atmosphere protects a spacecraft or a spacewalker.

Webb will be a million miles away from the Earth orbiting what we call the second Lagrange point (L2). Unlike in low Earth orbit, there is not much space debris out there that could damage the exposed mirror. 

But we do expect Webb to get impacted by these very tiny micrometeoroids for the duration of the mission, and Webb is designed to accommodate for them.

All of Webb's systems are designed to survive micrometeoroid impacts.

4. Why does the sunshield have five layers?

Webb has a giant, tennis-court sized sunshield, made of five, very thin layers of an insulating film called Kapton.  

Why five? One big, thick sunshield would conduct the heat from the bottom to the top more than would a shield with five layers separated by vacuum. With five layers to the sunshield, each successive one is cooler than the one below. 

The heat radiates out from between the layers, and the vacuum between the layers is a very good insulator. From studies done early in the mission development five layers were found to provide sufficient cooling. More layers would provide additional cooling, but would also mean more mass and complexity. We settled on five because it gives us enough cooling with some “margin” or a safety factor, and six or more wouldn’t return any additional benefits.

Fun fact: You could nearly boil water on the hot side of the sunshield, and it is frigid enough on the cold side to freeze nitrogen!

5. What kind of telescope is Webb?

Webb is a reflecting telescope that uses three curved mirrors. Technically, it’s called a three-mirror anastigmat.

6. What happens after launch? How long until there will be data?

We’ll give a short overview here, but check out our full FAQ for a more in-depth look.

In the first hour: About 30 minutes after liftoff, Webb will separate from the Ariane 5 launch vehicle. Shortly after this, we will talk with Webb from the ground to make sure everything is okay after its trip to space.

In the first day: After 24 hours, Webb will be nearly halfway to the Moon! About 2.5 days after launch, it will pass the Moon’s orbit, nearly a quarter of the way to Lagrange Point 1 (L2).

In the first week: We begin the major deployment of Webb. This includes unfolding the sunshield and tensioning the individual membranes, deploying the secondary mirror, and deploying the primary mirror.

In the first month: Deployment of the secondary mirror and the primary mirror occur. As the telescope cools in the shade of the sunshield, we turn on the warm electronics and initialize the flight software. As the telescope cools to near its operating temperature, parts of it are warmed with electronic heaters. This prevents condensation as residual water trapped within some of the materials making up the observatory escapes into space.

In the second month: We will turn on and operate Webb’s Fine Guidance Sensor, NIRCam, and NIRSpec instruments. 

The first NIRCam image, which will be an out-of-focus image of a single bright star, will be used to identify each mirror segment with its image of a star in the camera. We will also focus the secondary mirror.

In the third month: We will align the primary mirror segments so that they can work together as a single optical surface. We will also turn on and operate Webb’s mid-infrared instrument (MIRI), a camera and spectrograph that views a wide spectrum of infrared light. By this time, Webb will complete its journey to its L2 orbit position.

In the fourth through the sixth month: We will complete the optimization of the telescope. We will test and calibrate all of the science instruments.

After six months: The first scientific images will be released, and Webb will begin its science mission and start to conduct routine science operations.

7. Why not assemble it in orbit?

Various scenarios were studied, and assembling in orbit was determined to be unfeasible.

We examined the possibility of in-orbit assembly for Webb. The International Space Station does not have the capability to assemble precision optical structures. Additionally, space debris that resides around the space station could have damaged or contaminated Webb’s optics. Webb’s deployment happens far above low Earth orbit and the debris that is found there.

Finally, if the space station were used as a stopping point for the observatory, we would have needed a second rocket to launch it to its final destination at L2. The observatory would have to be designed with much more mass to withstand this “second launch,” leaving less mass for the mirrors and science instruments.

8. Who is James Webb?

This telescope is named after James E. Webb (1906–1992), our second administrator. Webb is best known for leading Apollo, a series of lunar exploration programs that landed the first humans on the Moon. 

However, he also initiated a vigorous space science program that was responsible for more than 75 launches during his tenure, including America's first interplanetary explorers.

Looking for some more in-depth FAQs? You can find them HERE.

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

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Sea Level Rise

For thousands of years, sea level has remained relatively stable. But now, Earth’s seas are rising. Since the beginning of the 20th century, they have risen about eight inches, and more than two inches in the last 20 years alone!

As water warms, it expands and takes up more space. That means that when oceans warm, the sea level rises. This summer, we’ve been researching exactly how global warming has impacted Greenland’s ice sheet. Our ICESat-2 mission will use a laser to measure the height of the planet’s surface. Over time, we will be able to provide a record of elevation change, and estimate how much water has melted into the ocean from land ice change.

So how much ice are we actually losing? Great question, but the answer might shock you. In Greenland alone, 303 gigatons of ice was lost in 2014!

Since we know that ice is melting, we’re working to gain a better understanding of how much and how fast. We’re using everything from planes, probes and boats, to satellites and lasers to determine the impact of global warming on the Earth’s ice.

Follow along for updates and information: http://climate.nasa.gov/

Concerning the new telescope -out of curiosity- what is the maximum distance it can view planets, galaxies, objects, anything up to -in terms of common/metric measurement, and/or years (if applicable) etc.? -Rose

Rare & Record-Breaking Black Holes

While even the most “normal” black hole seems exotic compared to the tranquil objects in our solar system, there are some record-breaking oddballs. Tag along as we look at the biggest, closest, farthest, and even “spinniest” black holes discovered in the universe … that we know of right now!

Located 700 million light-years away in the galaxy Holmberg 15A, astronomers found a black hole that is a whopping 40 billion times the mass of the Sun — setting the record for the biggest black hole found so far. On the other hand, the smallest known black hole isn’t quite so easy to pinpoint. There are several black holes with masses around five times that of our Sun. There’s even one candidate with just two and a half times the Sun’s mass, but scientists aren’t sure whether it’s the smallest known black hole or actually the heaviest known neutron star!

You may need to take a seat for this one. The black hole GRS 1915+105 will make you dizzier than an afternoon at an amusement park, as it spins over 1,000 times per second! Maybe even more bizarre than how fast this black hole is spinning is what it means for a black hole to spin at all! What we're actually measuring is how strongly the black hole drags the space-time right outside its event horizon — the point where nothing can escape. Yikes!

If you’re from Earth, the closest black hole that we know of right now, Mon X-1 in the constellation Monoceros, is about 3,000 light-years away. But never fear — that’s still really far away! The farthest known black hole is J0313-1806. The light from its surroundings took a whopping 13 billion years to get to us! And with the universe constantly expanding, that distance continues to grow.

So, we know about large (supermassive, hundreds of thousands to billions of times the Sun's mass) and small (stellar-mass, five to dozens of times the Sun's mass) black holes, but what about other sizes? Though rare, astronomers have found a couple that seem to fit in between and call them intermediate-mass black holes. As for tiny ones, primordial black holes, there is a possibility that they were around when the universe got its start — but there’s not enough evidence so far to prove that they exist!

One thing that’s on astronomers’ wishlist is to see two supermassive black holes crashing into one another. Unfortunately, that event hasn’t been detected — yet! It could be only a matter of time before one reveals itself.

Though these are the records now, in early 2021 … records are meant to be broken, so who knows what we’ll find next!

Add some of these records and rare finds to your black hole-watch list, grab your handy-dandy black hole field guide to learn even more about them — and get to searching!

Keep up with NASA Universe on Facebook and Twitter where we post regularly about black holes.

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