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Image: The feature that appears bright blue at the center of this scene is NASA's Curiosity Mars rover amid tan rocks and dark sand on Mount Sharp, as viewed by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on June 5, 2017. June 20, 2017: Using the most powerful telescope ever sent to Mars, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter caught a view of the Curiosity rover this month amid rocky mountainside terrain.
The car-size rover, climbing up lower Mount Sharp toward its next destination, appears as a blue dab against a background of tan rocks and dark sand in the enhanced-color image from the orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera. The exaggerated color, showing differences in Mars surface materials, makes Curiosity appear bluer than it really looks.
The image was taken on June 5, 2017, two months before the fifth anniversary of Curiosity's landing near Mount Sharp on Aug. 5 PDT (Aug. 6, 2017, EDT and Universal Time).
When the image was taken, Curiosity was part way between its investigation of active sand dunes lower on Mount Sharp, and "Vera Rubin Ridge," a destination uphill where the rover team intends to examine outcrops where hematite has been identified from Mars orbit.
HiRISE obtains images of Curiosity a few times each year. The University of Arizona, Tucson, operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colorado. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project and Mars Science Laboratory Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.
The Roll-Out Solar Array (ROSA) was deployed from the end of the Canadarm2 robotic arm Sunday, June 18 outside the International Space Station. ROSA is an experiment to test a new type of solar array that rolls open in space like a party favor and is more compact than current rigid panel designs.
Learn more about this new U.S. technology at: Deployable Space Systems, Inc. (DSS) http://www.dss-space.com
The Roll-Out Solar Array (ROSA) was deployed from the end of the Canadarm2 robotic arm Sunday, June 18 outside the International Space Station. ROSA is an experiment to test a new type of solar array that rolls open in space like a party favor and is more compact than current rigid panel designs.
Learn more about this new U.S. technology at: Deployable Space Systems, Inc. (DSS) http://www.dss-space.com
Image: Solar array unrolled with Earth visible below and end of Canadarm at right | June 20, 2017: Over the weekend of June 17-18, 2017, engineers on the ground remotely operated the International Space Station's robotic Canadarm2 to extract the Roll Out Solar Array (ROSA) experiment from the SpaceX Dragon resupply ship. The experiment will remain attached to the Canadarm2 over seven days to test the effectiveness of ROSA, an advanced, flexible solar array that rolls out like a tape measure.
Traditional solar panels used to power satellites can be bulky with heavy panels folded together using mechanical hinges. This new solar array's design rolls up to form a compact cylinder for launch with significantly less mass and volume, potentially offering substantial cost savings as well as an increase in power for satellites.
ROSA was developed as part of the Solar Electric Propulsion project sponsored by NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. NASA tested the ROSA technology in vacuum chambers on Earth several years ago, and this is its first test in space. This solar array technology was developed to power large spacecraft using highly-efficient electric propulsion on missions to deep space including Mars and the moon.
The crew taking part in NEEMO 22, the 22nd NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations mission, consists of astronauts, technicians and scientists who are now on board the Aquarius underwater habitat off the coast of Florida.
The habitat acts as a makeshift ‘space base’ for the aquanauts to make regular ‘waterwalks’ in full scuba gear and, by adjusting their buoyancy, they can simulate the gravity levels found on the Moon, Mars or asteroids.
NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren will be commander for this mission that will focus on exploration spacewalks as well as tasks based on the International Space Station. He is joined by ESA astronaut Pedro Duque, planetary scientist Trevor Gradd and research scientist Dom D’Agostino, along with two support technicians.
An international crew "splashed down" to the undersea Aquarius laboratory on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean on June 18, 2017, to prepare for future deep space missions during the 10-day NEEMO 22 expedition. NEEMO 22 will focus on both exploration spacewalks and objectives related to the International Space Station and deep space missions.
What is NEEMO? NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) is a NASA mission that sends groups of astronauts, engineers and scientists to live in Aquarius, the world's only undersea research station, for up to three weeks at a time. The Aquarius habitat and its surroundings provide a convincing analog for space exploration. On a mission, the NEEMO crew and professional habitat technicians live 60 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean in Florida International University’s Aquarius Reef Base undersea research habitat 6.2 miles off the coast of Key Largo, Florida.
The crew taking part in NEEMO 22, the 22nd NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations mission, consists of astronauts, technicians and scientists who are now on board the Aquarius underwater habitat off the coast of Florida.
The habitat acts as a makeshift ‘space base’ for the aquanauts to make regular ‘waterwalks’ in full scuba gear and, by adjusting their buoyancy, they can simulate the gravity levels found on the Moon, Mars or asteroids.
NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren will be commander for this mission that will focus on exploration spacewalks as well as tasks based on the International Space Station. He is joined by ESA astronaut Pedro Duque, planetary scientist Trevor Gradd and research scientist Dom D’Agostino, along with two support technicians.
An international crew "splashed down" to the undersea Aquarius laboratory on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean on June 18, 2017, to prepare for future deep space missions during the 10-day NEEMO 22 expedition. NEEMO 22 will focus on both exploration spacewalks and objectives related to the International Space Station and deep space missions.
What is NEEMO? NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) is a NASA mission that sends groups of astronauts, engineers and scientists to live in Aquarius, the world's only undersea research station, for up to three weeks at a time. The Aquarius habitat and its surroundings provide a convincing analog for space exploration. On a mission, the NEEMO crew and professional habitat technicians live 60 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean in Florida International University’s Aquarius Reef Base undersea research habitat 6.2 miles off the coast of Key Largo, Florida.
The crew taking part in NEEMO 22, the 22nd NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations mission, consists of astronauts, technicians and scientists who are now on board the Aquarius underwater habitat off the coast of Florida.
NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren will be commander for this mission that will focus on exploration spacewalks as well as tasks based on the International Space Station. He is joined by ESA astronaut Pedro Duque, planetary scientist Trevor Gradd and research scientist Dom D’Agostino.
An international crew "splashed down" to the undersea Aquarius laboratory on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean on June 18, 2017, to prepare for future deep space missions during the 10-day NEEMO 22 expedition. NEEMO 22 will focus on both exploration spacewalks and objectives related to the International Space Station and deep space missions.
What is NEEMO? NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) is a NASA mission that sends groups of astronauts, engineers and scientists to live in Aquarius, the world's only undersea research station, for up to three weeks at a time. The Aquarius habitat and its surroundings provide a convincing analog for space exploration. On a mission, the NEEMO crew and professional habitat technicians live 60 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean in Florida International University’s Aquarius Reef Base undersea research habitat 6.2 miles off the coast of Key Largo, Florida.
Roundup of activities at the European Space Agency's space pavilion on the opening day of the 52nd Paris Air and Space Show, including a visit by French President Emmanuel Macron, June 19, 2017.
Image: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope sits in front of the door to Chamber A, a giant thermal vacuum chamber located at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. The telescope will soon be moved into the chamber, where it will spend a hot Houston summer undergoing tests at sub-freezing cryogenic temperatures. The telescope will operate at an extremely cold 39 K (-234° C or -389° F) in space, so NASA is simulating those conditions on the ground, ensuring the optics and instruments will perform perfectly after launch.
In space, the telescope itself must be kept extremely cold, in order to be able to detect the infrared light from faint and very distant objects. To protect the telescope from external sources of light and heat (like the sun, Earth, and moon) as well as from heat emitted by the observatory itself, a five-layer, tennis court-sized sunshield acts like a parasol providing shade. The sunshield separates the observatory into a warm, sun-facing side (reaching temperatures close to 400 degrees Fahrenheit), and a cold side (185 degrees below zero) where the sunlight is blocked from interfering with the sensitive telescope instruments.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the scientific successor to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. It will be the most powerful space telescope ever built. Webb is an international project led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.
Image: NASA acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot and Jean-Yves Le Gall, president of France's space agency CNES | June 19, 2017: NASA acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot and Jean-Yves Le Gall, president of France's space agency Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales, conclude the signing of a cooperative agreement with a handshake June 19, 2017, at the 52nd International Paris Air Show at Le Bourget. Astronaut Thomas Pesquet of ESA (European Space Agency) and French President Emmanuel Macron participated in the event to reaffirm the agencies’ desire to explore opportunities for collaboration to advance science and to enable robotic and human exploration of the solar system.
France and the United States have a long history of cooperation in space, combining their talents over the years to advance science and launch exploration missions whose results have been instrumental in creating entirely new fields of research.
The leaders of the two space agencies, Acting NASA Administrator Robert Lightfoot, and CNES President Jean-Yves Le Gall, reaffirmed the agencies’ mutual desire to explore opportunities for collaboration to advance science and to enable robotic and human exploration of the solar system during a meeting Monday, June 19, at the 52nd International Paris Air Show at Le Bourget.
In particular, they discussed Mars exploration and Earth oceanography as well as the important work of International Space Station crew members, including French ESA Astronaut Thomas Pesquet, who returned to Earth earlier this month following his six-month mission on the orbiting laboratory.
CNES is providing a critical instrument for InSight, the next Mars exploration mission that will study the planet’s deep interior. France is supplying the SEIS seismometer (Seismic Experiment for Interior Structures) that will measure tectonic activity on Mars to help probe its interior structure. During the meeting, Le Gall informed Lightfoot that SEIS will be delivered this summer, in readiness for mission launch in May 2018. He also indicated that the SuperCam instrument for the Mars 2020 rover mission will be delivered to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in the autumn of 2018 for integration with the rover.
The agencies are also jointly developing a new space mission to make the first global survey of Earth's surface water, observe the fine details of the ocean's surface topography, and measure how water bodies change over time. The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission is targeted for launch in 2021. The mission scientists are meeting later this month to plan science activities, and the radio frequency unit of the wide-swath radar interferometer, which will be capable of acquiring high-resolution elevation measurements of large bodies of water, has been delivered as planned to JPL.
NASA and CNES have a shared interest in exploring opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation in support of the robotic and human exploration of Mars. Both space agencies affirm the scientific and technical achievements made aboard the space station and its pivotal role in preparing for human expeditions beyond low-Earth orbit into deep space. A joint NASA-CNES physics mini-laboratory, the Device for the study of Critical Liquids and Crystallization, or DECLIC, is continuing to operate aboard the space station after its relaunch in October 2016 aboard the sixth Orbital ATK commercial resupply mission.
June 19, 2017: Launched in 2009, the Kepler space telescope is our first mission capable of identifying Earth-size planets around other stars. On Monday, June 19, 2017, scientists announced the results from the final Kepler candidate catalog of the mission at a press conference at NASA's Ames Research Center.
To learn more about NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft, visit www.nasa.gov/kepler.
NASA's Ames Research Center is located in California's Silicon Valley.
June 19, 2017: NASA’s Kepler space telescope team has released a mission catalog of planet candidates that introduces 219 new planet candidates, 10 of which are near-Earth size and orbiting in their star's habitable zone, which is the range of distance from a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of a rocky planet.
This is the most comprehensive and detailed catalog release of candidate exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system, from Kepler’s first four years of data. It’s also the final catalog from the spacecraft’s view of the patch of sky in the Cygnus constellation.
With the release of this catalog, derived from data publicly available on the NASA Exoplanet Archive, there are now 4,034 planet candidates identified by Kepler. Of which, 2,335 have been verified as exoplanets. Of roughly 50 near-Earth size habitable zone candidates detected by Kepler, more than 30 have been verified.
Additionally, results using Kepler data suggest two distinct size groupings of small planets. Both results have significant implications for the search for life. The final Kepler catalog will serve as the foundation for more study to determine the prevalence and demographics of planets in the galaxy, while the discovery of the two distinct planetary populations shows that about half the planets we know of in the galaxy either have no surface, or lie beneath a deep, crushing atmosphere—an environment unlikely to host life.
The findings were presented at a news conference Monday at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley.
“The Kepler data set is unique, as it is the only one containing a population of these near Earth-analogs—planets with roughly the same size and orbit as Earth,” said Mario Perez, Kepler program scientist in the Astrophysics Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “Understanding their frequency in the galaxy will help inform the design of future NASA missions to directly image another Earth.”
The Kepler space telescope hunts for planets by detecting the minuscule drop in a star’s brightness that occurs when a planet crosses in front of it, called a transit.
This is the eighth release of the Kepler candidate catalog, gathered by reprocessing the entire set of data from Kepler’s observations during the first four years of its primary mission. This data will enable scientists to determine what planetary populations—from rocky bodies the size of Earth, to gas giants the size of Jupiter—make up the galaxy’s planetary demographics.
To ensure a lot of planets weren't missed, the team introduced their own simulated planet transit signals into the data set and determined how many were correctly identified as planets. Then, they added data that appear to come from a planet, but were actually false signals, and checked how often the analysis mistook these for planet candidates. This work told them which types of planets were overcounted and which were undercounted by the Kepler team’s data processing methods.
“This carefully-measured catalog is the foundation for directly answering one of astronomy’s most compelling questions—how many planets like our Earth are in the galaxy?” said Susan Thompson, Kepler research scientist for the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and lead author of the catalog study.
One research group took advantage of the Kepler data to make precise measurements of thousands of planets, revealing two distinct groups of small planets. The team found a clean division in the sizes of rocky, Earth-size planets and gaseous planets smaller than Neptune. Few planets were found between those groupings.
Using the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the group measured the sizes of 1,300 stars in the Kepler field of view to determine the radii of 2,000 Kepler planets with exquisite precision.
“We like to think of this study as classifying planets in the same way that biologists identify new species of animals,” said Benjamin Fulton, doctoral candidate at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, and lead author of the second study. “Finding two distinct groups of exoplanets is like discovering mammals and lizards make up distinct branches of a family tree.”
It seems that nature commonly makes rocky planets up to about 75 percent bigger than Earth. For reasons scientists don't yet understand, about half of those planets take on a small amount of hydrogen and helium that dramatically swells their size, allowing them to "jump the gap" and join the population closer to Neptune’s size.
The Kepler spacecraft continues to make observations in new patches of sky in its extended mission, searching for planets and studying a variety of interesting astronomical objects, from distant star clusters to objects such as the TRAPPIST-1 system of seven Earth-size planets, closer to home.
Ames manages the Kepler missions for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation operates the flight system with support from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
This compilation shows a few of the many highlights in an enormous three gigapixel image from ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope (VST) that includes the faint, glowing cloud of gas called Sharpless 2-54, the iconic Eagle Nebula and the Omega Nebula.
Credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO) Release Date: June 14, 2017
June 14 , 2017: Two of the sky’s more famous residents share the stage with a lesser-known neighbor in this enormous new three gigapixel image from ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope (VST). On the right lies the faint, glowing cloud of gas called Sharpless 2-54, the iconic Eagle Nebula is in the centre, and the Omega Nebula to the left. This cosmic trio makes up just a portion of a vast complex of gas and dust within which new stars are springing to life and illuminating their surroundings.
Sharpless 2-54 and the Eagle and Omega Nebulae are located roughly 7000 light-years away—the first two fall within the constellation of Serpens (The Serpent), while the latter lies within Sagittarius (The Archer). This region of the Milky Way houses a huge cloud of star-making material. The three nebulae indicate where regions of this cloud have clumped together and collapsed to form new stars; the energetic light from these stellar newborns has caused ambient gas to emit light of its own, which takes on the pinkish hue characteristic of areas rich in hydrogen.
Two of the objects in this image were discovered in a similar way. Astronomers first spotted bright star clusters in both Sharpless 2-54 and the Eagle Nebula, later identifying the vast, comparatively faint gas clouds swaddling the clusters. In the case of Sharpless 2-54, British astronomer William Herschel initially noticed its beaming star cluster in 1784. That cluster, catalogued as NGC 6604, appears in this image on the object’s left side. The associated very dim gas cloud remained unknown until the 1950s, when American astronomer Stewart Sharpless spotted it on photographs from the National Geographic Society–Palomar Observatory Sky Survey.
The Eagle Nebula did not have to wait so long for its full glory to be appreciated. Swiss astronomer Philippe Loys de Chéseaux first discovered its bright star cluster, NGC 6611, in 1745 or 1746. A couple of decades later, French astronomer Charles Messier observed this patch of sky and also documented the nebulosity present there, recording the object as Messier 16 in his influential catalogue.
As for the Omega Nebula, de Chéseaux did manage to observe its more prominent glow and duly noted it as a nebula in 1745. However, because the Swiss astronomer’s catalogue never achieved wider renown, Messier’s re-discovery of the Omega Nebula in 1764 led to its becoming Messier 17, the seventeenth object in the Frenchman’s popular compendium.
The observations from which this image was created were taken with ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope (VST), located at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. The huge final colour image was created by mosaicing dozens of pictures—each of 256 megapixels—from the telescope’s large-format OmegaCAM camera. The final result, which needed lengthy processing, totals 3.3 gigapixels, one of the largest images ever released by ESO.
More information ESO is the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organization in Europe and the world’s most productive ground-based astronomical observatory by far. It is supported by 16 countries: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, along with the host state of Chile. ESO carries out an ambitious program focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities enabling astronomers to make important scientific discoveries. ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organising cooperation in astronomical research. ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope and its world-leading Very Large Telescope Interferometer as well as two survey telescopes, VISTA working in the infrared and the visible-light VLT Survey Telescope. ESO is also a major partner in two facilities on Chajnantor, APEX and ALMA, the largest astronomical project in existence. And on Cerro Armazones, close to Paranal, ESO is building the 39-meter Extremely Large Telescope, the ELT, which will become “the world’s biggest eye on the sky”.
Hubble's variable nebula is named (like the Hubble telescope itself) after the American astronomer Edwin P. Hubble, who carried out some of the early studies of this object. It is a fan-shaped cloud of gas and dust which is illuminated by R Monocerotis (R Mon), the bright star at the bottom end of the nebula. Dense condensations of dust near the star cast shadows out into the nebula, and as they move the illumination changes, giving rise to the variations first noted by Hubble. The star itself, lying about 2,500 light-years from Earth, cannot be seen directly, but only through light scattered off of dust particles in the surrounding nebula. R Mon is believed to have a mass of about 10 times that of the Sun, and to have an age of only 300,000 years. There is probably a symmetrical counterpart of the fan-shaped nebula on the southern side of the star, but it is heavily obscured from view by dust lying between this lobe and our line of sight.
Judy: "This object lies along the Milky Way's dusty plane in the constellation Monoceros. One of my favorite things about this kind of nebula is that it reminds us that there can be a lot unseen in space. An optical illusion is produced by human intuition: it may look to you as though this is a bright cloud against a dark surface. In reality, this is a small hole in a largely unseen cloud which allows for light from a newly forming star to shine through."
"The variation in the nebula is most likely caused by shadows being cast by blobs of dust accreting near the young star. Note that the accretion process and the star itself are impossible to see in this image, and they occur at a scale too small and too distant for Hubble to see in any detail. The presence of the dusty knots and their close proximity to the star can be inferred by the shadows they cast and how fast they move across the nebula. Because the nebula is around a light year in size, the shadows appear to flow outward, which demonstrates to us the speed of light (or the speed of darkness?) in a way that I find profoundly beautiful. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the telescope could observe this object many more times so we could watch the light flow lazily through the Universe?"
Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI) Processing: Judy Schmidt Judy's website: http://geckzilla.com Release Date: June 13, 2017
Technical details: Data collected for Proposal 5574 made this image possible. WF/PC2 Cycle 4: Polarization Proposal
