Assembled using raw uncalibrated red, green, and violet filtered images of Saturn taken by the Cassini spacecraft on August 12, 2017.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Kevin M. Gill
Image Date: August 12, 2017
Release Date: August 14, 2017#NASA #Astronomy #Science #Space #Saturn #Planet #Rings #Moon #Gravity #DensityWaves #SolarSystem #Exploration #Cassini #Spacecraft #JPL #Pasadena #California #UnitedStates #ESA #ASI #STEM #Education
A substantial coronal hole rotated into a position where it is facing Earth (Aug. 9-11, 2017). Coronal holes are areas of open magnetic field that spew out charged particles as solar wind that spreads into space. If that solar wind interacts with our own magnetosphere it can generate aurora. In this view of the sun in extreme ultraviolet light, the coronal hole appears as the dark stretch near the center of the sun. It was the most distinctive feature on the sun over the past week.
Credit: Solar Dynamics Observatory, NASA
Capture Date: August 9, 2017
Release Date: August 14, 2017#NASA #Astronomy #Science #Space #SpaceWeather #Sun #Solar #Corona #CoronalHole #Plasma #MagneticField #Earth #Magnetosphere #Aurora #Astrophysics #Spacecraft #SDO #Goddard #GSFC #Greenbelt #Maryland #UnitedStates #STEM #Education
Greenland is best known for its ice, but some remote sensing scientists found themselves closely tracking a sizable wildfire burning along the island’s coast in August 2017. The fire burned in western Greenland, about 150 kilometers (90 miles) northeast of Sisimiut.
Satellites first detected evidence of the fire on July 31, 2017. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on Suomi NPP collected daily images of smoke streaming from the fire over the next week. The Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured this more detailed image of the fire on August 3, 2017.
While it is not unprecedented for satellites to observe fire activity in Greenland, a preliminary analysis by Stef Lhermitte of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands suggests that MODIS has detected far more fire activity in Greenland in 2017 than it did during any other year since the sensor began collecting data in 2000.
Fires detected in Greenland by MODIS are usually small, most likely campfires lit by hunters or backpackers. But Landsat did capture imagery of another sizable fire in August 2015. According to Ruth Mottram of the Danish Meteorological Institute (DNI), neither DNI nor other scientific groups maintain detailed records of fire activity in Greenland, but many meteorologists at the institute have heard anecdotal reports of fires.
The blaze appears to be burning through peat, noted Miami University scientist Jessica McCarty. That would mean the fire likely produced a sharp increase in wildfire-caused carbon dioxide emissions in Greenland for 2017, noted atmospheric scientist Mark Parrington of the European Commission’s
Copernicus program.
It is not clear what triggered this fire, though a lack of documented lightning prior to its ignition suggests the fire was probably triggered by human activity. The area is regularly used by reindeer hunters, and is not too far from a town with a population of 5,500 people.
The summer has been quite dry. Sisimiut saw almost no rain in June and half of the usual amount in July. That may have parched dwarf willows, shrubs, grasses, mosses, and other vegetation that commonly live in Greenland’s coastal areas and made them more likely to burn.
Fires emit a soot-like material called black carbon. It is likely that winds will transport some of this material east to the ice sheet where it will contribute to a line of darkened snow and ice along the western edge of Greenland’s ice sheet. This area is of interest to climate scientists because darkened snow and ice tends to melt more rapidly than when it is clean.
Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland, with information from Ruth Mottram (Danish Meteorological Institute), Jessica McCarty (Miami University), Mark Parrington (COPERNICUS), and Stef Lhermitte (Delft University of Technology).
Instrument(s): Landsat 8 - OLI
Image Date: August 3, 2017
Release Date: August 7, 2017#NASA #Earth #Science #Satellite #Greenland #Grønland #Wildfire #Smoke #Sisimiut #Island #Landsat #Landsat8 #OLI #USGS #EarthObservation #ClimateChange #Climate #Environment #Denmark #Danmark #STEM #Education
Aug. 9, 2017: Given adequate sunlight and nutrients, phytoplankton populations can swell into blooms large enough to be visible from space. On August 3, 2017, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired this image of several blooms in the Caspian Sea.
Phytoplankton blooms are often harmless, and are an important food source for marine life. Other times, blooms can be harmful; they can deplete the water’s oxygen and suffocate marine life, and produce toxins that can be harmful to both aquatic creatures and humans.
Lake Urmia is visible west of the Caspian Sea. Microscopic organisms periodically turn the lake’s salty water striking shades of red and orange.
The Caspian Sea is the largest enclosed inland body of water on Earth by area, variously classed as the world's largest lake or a full-fledged sea. It is in an endorheic basin (a basin without outflows) located between Europe and Asia. It is bounded by Kazakhstan to the northeast, Russia to the northwest, Azerbaijan to the west, Iran to the south, and Turkmenistan to the southeast.
(Source: Wikipedia)
Image Credit: NASA images by Norman Kuring, NASA’s Ocean Color web Caption Credit: Adam Voiland
Instrument(s): Aqua - MODIS
Image Date: August 3, 2017
Release Date: August 9, 2017#NASA #Earth #Science #Satellite #CaspianSea #Phytoplankton #Bloom #LakeUrmia #Asia #Europe #EarthObservation #Aqua #MODIS #Goddard #GSFC #UnitedStates #STEM #Education
The aurora and the night sky above Earth’s atmosphere are pictured from the International Space Station. A portion of the station’s solar arrays and a pair of nitrogen/oxygen recharge system tanks are pictured in the foreground.
Credit: NASA/JSC
Image Date: June 19, 2017
#NASA #ISS #Earth #Science #Aurora #Planet #Atmosphere #EarthObservation #Photography #Astronaut #Human #Spaceflight #Expedition52 #UnitedStates #JSC #OverviewEffect #OrbitalPerspective #STEM
#Education
Aug. 10, 2017: In 1887, American astronomer Lewis Swift discovered a glowing cloud, or nebula, that turned out to be a small galaxy about 2.2 billion light years from Earth. Today, it is known as the “starburst” galaxy IC 10, referring to the intense star formation activity occurring there.
More than a hundred years after Swift’s discovery, astronomers are studying IC 10 with the most powerful telescopes of the 21st century. New observations with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory reveal many pairs of stars that may one day become sources of perhaps the most exciting cosmic phenomenon observed in recent years: gravitational waves.
By analyzing Chandra observations of IC 10 spanning a decade, astronomers found over a dozen black holes and neutron stars feeding off gas from young, massive stellar companions. Such double star systems are known as “X-ray binaries” because they emit large amounts of X-ray light. As a massive star orbits around its compact companion, either a black hole or neutron star, material can be pulled away from the giant star to form a disk of material around the compact object. Frictional forces heat the infalling material to millions of degrees, producing a bright X-ray source.
When the massive companion star runs out fuel, it will undergo a catastrophic collapse that will produce a supernova explosion, and leave behind a black hole or neutron star. The end result is two compact objects: either a pair of black holes, a pair of neutron stars, or a black hole and neutron star. If the separation between the compact objects becomes small enough as time passes, they will produce gravitational waves. Over time, the size of their orbit will shrink until they merge. LIGO has found three examples of black hole pairs merging in this way in the past two years.
Starburst galaxies like IC 10 are excellent places to search for X-ray binaries because they are churning out stars rapidly. Many of these newly born stars will be pairs of young and massive stars. The most massive of the pair will evolve more quickly and leave behind a black hole or a neutron star partnered with the remaining massive star. If the separation of the stars is small enough, an X-ray binary system will be produced.
This new composite image of IC 10 combines X-ray data from Chandra (blue) with an optical image (red, green, blue) taken by amateur astronomer Bill Snyder from the Heavens Mirror Observatory in Sierra Nevada, California. The X-ray sources detected by Chandra appear as a darker blue than the stars detected in optical light.
The young stars in IC 10 appear to be just the right age to give a maximum amount of interaction between the massive stars and their compact companions, producing the most X-ray sources. If the systems were younger, then the massive stars would not have had time to go supernova and produce a neutron star or black hole, or the orbit of the massive star and the compact object would not have had time to shrink enough for mass transfer to begin. If the star system were much older, then both compact objects would probably have already formed. In this case transfer of matter between the compact objects is unlikely, preventing the formation of an X-ray emitting disk.
Chandra detected 110 X-ray sources in IC 10. Of these, over forty are also seen in optical light and 16 of these contain “blue supergiants”, which are the type of young, massive, hot stars described earlier. Most of the other sources are X-ray binaries containing less massive stars. Several of the objects show strong variability in their X-ray output, indicative of violent interactions between the compact stars and their companions.
A pair of papers describing these results were published in the February 10th, 2017 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. The papers are available online here:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.08611
https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.03803
The authors of the study are Silas Laycock from the UMass Lowell’s Center for Space Science and Technology (UML); Rigel Capallo, a graduate student at UML; Dimitris Christodoulou from UML; Benjamin Williams from the University of Washington in Seattle; Breanna Binder from the California State Polytechnic University in Pomona; and, Andrea Prestwich from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, controls Chandra's science and flight operations.
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/UMass Lowell/S. Laycock et al.; Optical: Bill Snyder
Release Date: August 10, 2017
#NASA #Astronomy #Science #Space #Galaxy #IC10 #Starburst #Cassiopeia #Cosmos #Universe #Gravitational #Waves #Chandra #Xray #Observatory #MSFC #Marshall #STEM #Education
Aug. 3, 2017: A dynamic storm at the southern edge of Jupiter’s northern polar region dominates this Jovian cloudscape, courtesy of NASA’s Juno spacecraft.
This storm is a long-lived anticyclonic oval named North North Temperate Little Red Spot 1 (NN-LRS-1); it has been tracked at least since 1993, and may be older still. An anticyclone is a weather phenomenon where winds around the storm flow in the direction opposite to that of the flow around a region of low pressure. It is the third largest anticyclonic oval on the planet, typically around 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) long. The color varies between red and off-white (as it is now), but this JunoCam image shows that it still has a pale reddish core within the radius of maximum wind speeds.
Citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran processed this image using data from the JunoCam imager. The image has been rotated so that the top of the image is actually the equatorial regions while the bottom of the image is of the northern polar regions of the planet.
The image was taken on July 10, 2017 at 6:42 p.m. PDT (9:42 p.m. EDT), as the Juno spacecraft performed its seventh close flyby of Jupiter. At the time the image was taken, the spacecraft was about 7,111 miles (11,444 kilometers) from the tops of the clouds of the planet at a latitude of 44.5 degrees.
JPL manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. The Juno mission is part of the New Frontiers Program managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. JPL is a division of Caltech in Pasadena.
More information about Juno is online at http://www.nasa.gov/juno and http://missionjuno.swri.edu.
JunoCam's raw images are available for the public to peruse and process into image products at: www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt/Seán Doran
Release Date: August 3, 2017#NASA #Astronomy #Space #Science #Jupiter #Planet #Atmosphere #LittleRedSpot #LRS #NNLRS1 #Juno #Spacecraft #SwRI #JPL #Pasadena #California #UnitedStates #STEM #Education
#CitizenScience
Closeup of sunspot showing coils arcing over active region
Aug. 4, 2017: On July 5, 2017, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory watched an active region—an area of intense and complex magnetic fields—rotate into view on the Sun. The satellite continued to track the region as it grew and eventually rotated across the Sun and out of view on July 17.
With their complex magnetic fields, sunspots are often the source of interesting solar activity. During its 13-day trip across the face of the Sun, the active region—dubbed AR12665—put on a show for NASA’s Sun-watching satellites, producing several solar flares, a coronal mass ejection and a solar energetic particle event. Watch the video below to learn how NASA’s satellites tracked the sunspot over the course of these two weeks.
This image shows a blended view of the sunspot in visible and extreme ultraviolet light, revealing bright coils arcing over the active region—particles spiraling along magnetic field lines.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO
Image Date: July 5, 2017
Release Date: August 4, 2017 #NASA #Astronomy #Science #Space #SpaceWeather #Sun #Solar #Sunspot #ActiveRegion #AR12665 #Plasma #MagneticField #Astrophysics #Spacecraft #SDO #Goddard #GSFC #Greenbelt #Maryland #UnitedStates #STEM #Education
Image: Super typhoon photographed from low Earth orbit with Soyuz spacecraft in left of frame | Aug. 2, 2017: NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik photographed Super Typhoon Noru in the Northwestern Pacific Ocean on August 1, 2017, as the International Space Station passed overhead. He shared images of the massive storm on social media, writing, "Super Typhoon #Noru, amazing the size of this weather phenomenon, you can almost sense its power from 250 miles above."
As of 11 a.m. EDT on August 1, the storm was centered near 24.7 degrees north latitude and 137.0 degrees east longitude, with maximum sustained winds near 90 knots. By August 2 at 5 a.m. EDT, the maximum sustained winds were near 100 knots. NASA satellites are keeping track of the typhoon as it continues its slow trek through the Pacific toward southwestern Japan.
Credit: NASA
Release Date: August 2, 2017#NASA #ISS #Earth #Science #Weather #Typhoon #SuperTyphoon #Storm #PacificOcean #Japan #日本 #Soyuz #SoyuzMS05 #Astronaut #RandyBresnik #Russia #Россия #Human #Spaceflight #Expedition52 #UnitedStates #JSC #STEM
#Education
