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May 4, 2018: NASA's Space to Ground is your weekly update on what's happening aboard the International Space Station.
During Expedition 55, researchers are studying Earth atmospherics, the effects of microgravity on bone marrow, materials’ responses to space environments, and biological samples’ responses to simulated gravity.
Credit: NASA Johnson (JSC) Duration: 2 minutes, 4 seconds Release Date: May 4, 2018
U.S. Astronaut A.J. (Drew) Feustel: "On Monday, I captured this amazing image of all the places I called home for the first 32 years of my life. Many of my family and friends are in this photo, somewhere."
Drew Feustel is currently a part of the Expedition 55 crew that launched to the International Space Station in March 2018.
Andrew J. Feustel was selected by NASA in 2000. He has been assigned to Expedition 55/56, scheduled to launch in March 2018. The Lake Orion, Michigan native has a Ph.D. in the Geological Sciences, specializing in Seismology, and is a veteran of two spaceflights. In 2009, Dr. Feustel served on STS-125. This mission launched on Atlantis and was the fifth and final mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope that improved the observatory's capabilities through 2014. Dr. Feustel also served on STS-134, launching on Endeavour to deliver the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer and an ExPress Logistics Carrier to the International Space Station. Dr. Feustel has logged more than 29 days in space with over 42 hours in spacewalks.
NASA's next Red Planet explorer has arrived at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California—a big step forward in the countdown to T-zero. The spacecraft is called InSight—short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport—and it's being tested, fueled and encapsulated for launch aboard the powerful United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. The upcoming liftoff will mark the first time an interplanetary mission has launched from the West Coast.
Starliner will launch NASA Astronauts again from U.S. soil "One, two, three Boeing CST-100 Starliners are coming together inside this historic spacecraft factory at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The goal of the commercially developed and operating spacecraft is to return crew launch capabilities to NASA and the United States."
American Astronauts will soon launch again from U.S.
U.S. Air Force “Guardian Angel” Pararescue specialists secure a covered life raft, during an astronaut rescue training exercise off of Florida’s eastern coast in April 2018. The specially designed 20-person life raft is equipped with enough food, water and medical supplies to sustain both rescuers and crew for up to three days, if necessary.
Ted Mosteller, leader of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program Landing and Recovery Team, described the multi-agency operation as “like insurance. You have insurance on your car or house, but you hope you never have to use it.”
Rescue and recovery involves meticulous planning and close coordination between NASA, the Department of Defense, and company recovery teams from NASA's commercial partners, Boeing and SpaceX. Boeing's Starliner and SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft are being developed and tested to fly astronauts to and from the International Space Station, from U.S. soil. In the event of a variety of contingency landings, an elite team is prepared to rescue the crew anywhere in the world.
American Astronauts will soon launch again from U.S. soil
Commercial Crew Program astronauts, from the left Doug Hurley, Eric Boe, Bob Behnken and Suni Williams, pose just outside Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The astronauts toured the pad for an up-close look at modifications that are in work for the SpaceX Crew Dragon flight tests. The tower modifications included removal of the space shuttle era rotating service structure. Future integration of the crew access arm will allow for safe crew entry for launch and exit from the spacecraft in the unlikely event a pad abort is required.
The sky is lit by the setting Moon. Panoramic shot during our last camping night on the bank of Lake iIssuk-Kul on a 2017 trip to Kyrgyzstan.
Kyrgyzstan is a landlocked country with mountainous terrain. It is bordered by Kazakhstan to the north, Uzbekistan to the west and southwest. (Source: Wikipedia)
Credit: Mike Reva (ŠŠøŃ Š°ŠøŠ» Š ŠµŠ²Š°) Location: Issuk-Kul, Kyrgyzstan Release Date: May 2, 2018
The exoplanet WASP-107b is a gas giant, orbiting a highly active K-type main sequence star. The star is about 200 light-years from Earth. Using spectroscopy, scientists were able to find helium in the escaping atmosphere of the planet—the first detection of this element in the atmosphere of an exoplanet.
May 2, 2018: Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have detected helium in the atmosphere of the exoplanet WASP-107b. This is the first time this element has been detected in the atmosphere of a planet outside the Solar System. The discovery demonstrates the ability to use infrared spectra to study exoplanet extended atmospheres.
Image Description: The exoplanet WASP-107b is a gas giant, orbiting a highly active K-type main sequence star. The star is about 200 light-years from Earth. Using spectroscopy, scientists were able to find helium in the escaping atmosphere of the planet—the first detection of this element in the atmosphere of an exoplanet.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, M. Kornmesser
The international team of astronomers, led by Jessica Spake, a PhD student at the University of Exeter in the UK, used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 to discover helium in the atmosphere of the exoplanet WASP-107b This is the first detection of its kind.
Spake explains the importance of the discovery: “Helium is the second-most common element in the Universe after hydrogen. It is also one of the main constituents of the planets Jupiter and Saturn in our Solar System. However, up until now helium had not been detected on exoplanets—despite searches for it.”
The team made the detection by analysing the infrared spectrum of the atmosphere of WASP-107b [1]. Previous detections of extended exoplanet atmospheres have been made by studying the spectrum at ultraviolet and optical wavelengths; this detection therefore demonstrates that exoplanet atmospheres can also be studied at longer wavelengths.
“The strong signal from helium we measured demonstrates a new technique to study upper layers of exoplanet atmospheres in a wider range of planets,” says Spake “Current methods, which use ultraviolet light, are limited to the closest exoplanets. We know there is helium in the Earth’s upper atmosphere and this new technique may help us to detect atmospheres around Earth-sized exoplanets—which is very difficult with current technology.”
WASP-107b is one of the lowest density planets known: While the planet is about the same size as Jupiter, it has only 12% of Jupiter’s mass. The exoplanet is about 200 light-years from Earth and takes less than six days to orbit its host star.
The amount of helium detected in the atmosphere of WASP-107b is so large that its upper atmosphere must extend tens of thousands of kilometers out into space. This also makes it the first time that an extended atmosphere has been discovered at infrared wavelengths.
Since its atmosphere is so extended, the planet is losing a significant amount of its atmospheric gases into space—between ~0.1-4% of its atmosphere’s total mass every billion years [2].
As far back as the year 2000, it was predicted that helium would be one of the most readily-detectable gases on giant exoplanets, but until now, searches were unsuccessful.
David Sing, co-author of the study also from the University of Exeter, concludes: “Our new method, along with future telescopes such as the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, will allow us to analyse atmospheres of exoplanets in far greater detail than ever before.”
Notes: [1] The measurement of an exoplanet’s atmosphere is performed when the planet passes in front of its host star. A tiny portion of the star’s light passes through the exoplanet’s atmosphere, leaving detectable fingerprints in the spectrum of the star. The larger the amount of an element present in the atmosphere, the easier the detection becomes.
[2] Stellar radiation has a significant effect on the rate at which a planet’s atmosphere escapes. The star WASP-107 is highly active, supporting the atmospheric loss. As the atmosphere absorbs radiation it heats up, so the gas rapidly expands and escapes more quickly into space.
More information: The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.
The study was published in the paper “Helium in the eroding atmosphere of an exoplanet”, published in Nature.
· TESS begins quest to find habitable extrasolar planets
· Space Launch System flight hardware touches down at Kennedy
· NASA, Boeing may evolve flight test strategy
· Space explorers inducted into U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame
· Tupperware takes to space to help improve astronaut diets
· Students help NASA decide what plants to grow in space
· Emergency Response Team trains to protect space center
· Center Director Cabana provides update to National Space Club
· JoAnn Morgan shares story for Women's History Month
· Crowds flock to spaceport for Family Open House Day
Spaceport Magazine is a monthly NASA publication that serves Kennedy Space Center employees and the American public. The magazine’s wide topic variety mirrors Kennedy's diverse spaceport operations. From launch processing to center development and employee stories, Spaceport Magazine covers it all.
Timelapse HD 1080p video Credit: AstronautiCAST/JSC Duration: 3 minutes, 11 seconds Video Capture Date: February 13, 2018 Release Date: February 17, 2018
Original timelapse by Riccardo Rossi (ISAA) - Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License -
"Sunrise crashes an aurora party over the southern hemisphere," said NASA astronaut Ricky Arnold of this image he snapped from the International Space Station.
Auroras are one of the many Earthly phenomena the crew of the space station observe from their perch high above the planet. The dancing lights of auroras provide spectacular views, but also capture the imagination of scientists who study incoming energy and particles from our Sun. Auroras are one effect of such energetic particles, which can speed out from the Sun both in a steady stream called the solar wind or from giant eruptions known as coronal mass ejections or CMEs. After a trip toward Earth that can last three days, the solar particles and magnetic fields cause the release of particles already trapped near Earth, which in turn trigger reactions in the upper atmosphere in which oxygen and nitrogen molecules release photons of light. The result: the Northern and Southern lights.
On the International Space Station (ISS), you can only admire an aurora until the sun rises. Then the background Earth becomes too bright. Unfortunately, after sunset, the rapid orbit of the ISS around the Earth means that sunrise is usually less than 47 minutes away.
In this image, a green aurora is visible below the ISS—and on the horizon to the upper right, while sunrise approaches ominously from the upper left. Watching an aurora from space can be mesmerizing as its changing shape has been compared to a giant green amoeba. Auroras are composed of energetic electrons and protons from the Sun that impact the Earth's magnetic field and then spiral down toward the Earth so fast that they cause atmospheric atoms and molecules to glow. The ISS orbits at nearly the same height as auroras, many times flying right through an aurora's thin upper layers, an event that neither harms astronauts nor changes the shape of the aurora.
This pretty, cloud-like object may not look much like a galaxy—it lacks the well-defined arms of a spiral galaxy, or the reddish bulge of an elliptical—but it is in fact something known as a lenticular galaxy. Lenticular galaxies sit somewhere between the spiral and elliptical types; they are disc-shaped, like spirals, but they no longer form large numbers of new stars and thus contain only ageing populations of stars, like ellipticals.
NGC 2655’s core is extremely luminous, resulting in its additional classification as a Seyfert galaxy: a type of active galaxy with strong and characteristic emission lines. This luminosity is thought to be produced as matter is dragged onto the accretion disc of a supermassive black hole sitting at the center of NGC 2655. The structure of NGC 2655’s outer disc, on the other hand, appears calmer, but it is oddly-shaped. The complex dynamics of the gas in the galaxy suggest that it may have had a turbulent past, including mergers and interactions with other galaxies.
NGC 2655 is located about 80 million light-years from Earth in the constellation of Camelopardalis (The Giraffe). Camelopardalis contains many other interesting deep-sky objects, including the open cluster NGC 1502, the elegant Kemble’s Cascade asterism, and the starburst galaxy NGC 2146.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Fillipenko Release Date: April 23, 2018
This view of Japan from the International Space Station looks from north to south and encompasses the cities of Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Hiroshima and Fukuoka.
The International Space Station was orbiting above the Tasman Sea when an Expedition 55 crew member took this picture of New Zealand's North Island where the city of Auckland is located. The sun's glint over the South Pacific Ocean and the Tasman Sea clearly outlines the island nation.
"Wanderers is a vision of humanity's expansion into the Solar System, based on scientific ideas and concepts of what our future in space might look like, if it ever happens. The locations depicted in the film are digital recreations of actual places in the Solar System, built from real photos and map data where available."
"Without any apparent story, other than what you may fill in by yourself, the idea of the film is primarily to show a glimpse of the fantastic and beautiful nature that surrounds us on our neighboring worlds—and above all, how it might appear to us if we were there."
"As some may notice I have borrowed ideas and concepts from science fiction authors such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Arthur C. Clarke, just to name a few. And visually, I of course owe many tips of my hat to painter Chesley Bonestell—the legendary master of space art."
"More directly, with kind permission from Ann Druyan I have also borrowed the voice of astronomer and author Carl Sagan to narrate the film. The audio I used are excerpts from his own reading of his book: 'Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space' (1994, Random House) penguinrandomhouse.com/books/159735/pale-blue-dot-by-carl-sagan/ —needless to say, a huge inspiration for this film.
-------------- CREDITS: VISUALS BY - Erik Wernquist - erik@erikwernquist.com MUSIC BY - Cristian Sandquist - cristiansandquist@mac.com WRITTEN AND NARRATED BY - Carl Sagan - from his book 'Pale Blue Dot' penguinrandomhouse.com/books/159735/pale-blue-dot-by-carl-sagan/, courtesy of Ann Druyan, copyright by Democritus Properties, LLC, with all rights reserved COLOR GRADE BY - Caj MĆ¼ller/Beckholmen Film - caj@beckholmenfilm.se LIVE ACTION PHOTOGRAPHY BY - Mikael Hall/Vidiotism - mikael@vidiotism.com LIVE ACTION PERFORMANCE BY - Anna Nerman, Camilla Hammarstrƶm, Hanna Mellin VOCALIST - Nina FylkegĆ„rd - nina@ladystardust.se THANK YOU - Johan Persson, Calle Herdenberg, Micke Lindgren, Satrio J. Studt, Tomas Axelsson, Christian Lundqvist, Micke Lindell, Sigfrid Sƶderberg, Fredrik Strage, Johan Antoni, Henrik Johansson, Michael UvnƤs, Hanna Mellin
THIS FILM WAS MADE WITH USE OF PHOTOS AND TEXTURES FROM: NASA/JPL, NASA/CICLOPS, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, ESA, John Van Vliet, Bjƶrn Jonsson (and many others, of which I unfortunately do not know the names)
