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Drew: "The mighty Amazon River shares its history with us from high above on the International Space Station where the former tracks in the landscape are revealed."
The Amazon River in South America is the largest river by discharge of water in the world, and the second in length. The river enters the Atlantic Ocean in north-eastern Brazil in a broad estuary about 240 kilometers (150 mi) wide. The mouth of the main stem is 80 kilometers (50 mi). The width of the Amazon is between 1.6 and 10 kilometers (1.0 and 6.2 mi) at low stage, but expands during the wet season to 48 kilometers (30 mi) or more. Because of its vast dimensions, it is sometimes called "The River Sea". (Source: Wikipedia)
Credit: U.S. Astronaut A.J. (Drew) Feustel Release Date: May 15, 2018
Springtime in the Chesapeake Bay region of the eastern United States.
The Chesapeake Bay is an estuary in the District of Columbia and the U.S. states of Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia, lying inland from the Atlantic Ocean and surrounded to the west by the North American mainland and to the east by the Delmarva Peninsula. With its northern portion in Maryland and the southern part in Virginia, the Chesapeake Bay is a very important feature for the ecology and economy of those two states, as well as others. More than 150 major rivers and streams flow into the bay's 64,299-square-mile (166,534 km2) drainage basin, which covers parts of six states (New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia) and all of Washington, D.C.
The word Chesepiooc is an Algonquian word referring to a village "at a big river". It is the seventh oldest surviving English place-name in the U.S., first applied as "Chesepiook" by explorers heading north from the Roanoke Colony into a Chesapeake tributary in 1585 or 1586. (Source: Wikipedia)
Image Credit: U.S. Astronaut Ricky Arnold Release Date: May 14, 2018
A Pale Blue Dot via CubeSat | NASA JPL First image captured by one of NASA's Mars Cube One (MarCO) CubeSats The image, which shows both the CubeSat's unfolded high-gain antenna at right and the Earth and its moon in the center, was acquired by MarCO-B on May 9. Distance: Over 1 million kilometers from Earth May 15, 2018: NASA's Voyager 1 took a classic portrait of Earth from several billion miles away in 1990. Now a class of tiny, boxy spacecraft, known as CubeSats, have just taken their own version of a "pale blue dot" image, capturing Earth and its moon in one shot.
NASA set a new distance record for CubeSats on May 8 when a pair of CubeSats called Mars Cube One (MarCO) reached 621,371 miles (1 million kilometers) from Earth. One of the CubeSats, called MarCO-B (and affectionately known as "Wall-E" to the MarCO team) used a fisheye camera to snap its first photo on May 9. That photo is part of the process used by the engineering team to confirm the spacecraft's high-gain antenna has properly unfolded.
As a bonus, it captured Earth and its moon as tiny specks floating in space.
"Consider it our homage to Voyager," said Andy Klesh, MarCO's chief engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. JPL built the CubeSats and leads the MarCO mission. "CubeSats have never gone this far into space before, so it's a big milestone. Both our CubeSats are healthy and functioning properly. We're looking forward to seeing them travel even farther."
The MarCO spacecraft are the first CubeSats ever launched to deep space. Most never go beyond Earth orbit; they generally stay below 497 miles (800 kilometers) above the planet. Though they were originally developed to teach university students about satellites, CubeSats are now a major commercial technology, providing data on everything from shipping routes to environmental changes.
The MarCO CubeSats were launched on May 5 along with NASA's InSight lander, a spacecraft that will touch down on Mars and study the planet's deep interior for the first time. InSight, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, will attempt to land on Mars on Nov. 26. JPL also leads the InSight mission.
Mars landings are notoriously challenging due to the Red Planet's thin atmosphere. The MarCO CubeSats will follow along behind InSight during its cruise to Mars. Should they make it all the way to Mars, they will radio back data about InSight while it enters the atmosphere and descends to the planet's surface. The high-gain antennas are key to that effort; the MarCO team have early confirmation that the antennas have successfully deployed, but will continue to test them in the weeks ahead.
InSight won't rely on the MarCO mission for data relay. That job will fall to NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. But the MarCOs could be a pathfinder so that future missions can "bring their own relay" to Mars. They could also demonstrate a number of experimental technologies, including their antennas, radios and propulsion systems, which will allow CubeSats to collect science in the future.
Later this month, the MarCOs will attempt the first trajectory correction maneuvers ever performed by CubeSats. This maneuver lets them steer towards Mars, blazing a trail for CubeSats to come.
May 15, 2018: Each and every day NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) observes our Sun and relays observational data to scientists on Earth in an effort to understand the causes of solar variability and its impacts on Earth. SDO is helping researchers understand the Sun's influence on Earth and Near-Earth space by studying the solar atmosphere on small scales of space and time and in many wavelengths simultaneously.
SDO's goal is to understand, driving towards a predictive capability, the solar variations that influence life on Earth and humanity's technological systems by determining how the Sun's magnetic field is generated and structured, and also how this stored magnetic energy is converted and released into the heliosphere and geospace in the form of solar wind, energetic particles, and variations in the solar irradiance.
This image of the Sun was taken on May 15, 2018, by SDO.
Image Credit: NASA/Solar Dynamics Observatory Image Date: May 15, 2018 Release Date: May 15, 2018
May 15, 2018: The European Space Agency’s Trace Gas Orbiter mission arrived at Mars in October 2016. After a year spent carefully adjusting its position, the spacecraft is now beginning its science operations. The Trace Gas Orbiter’s instruments will be able to look through the atmosphere to identify trace gases—in particular methane—which could indicate signs of past or even present life. The orbiter will also act as a relay for rovers on the Martian surface.
Andros is the largest archipelago in the Bahamas (100 miles long and 40 miles wide) and one of the least explored. Andros in total has an area greater than all the other 700 Bahamian islands combined. The land area of Andros consists of hundreds of small islets and cays connected by mangrove estuaries and tidal swamplands, together with three major islands: North Andros, Mangrove Cay, and South Andros. (Source: WIkipedia)
The Bahamas, officially the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, is an island country consisting of more than 700 islands, cays, and islets in the Atlantic Ocean; north of Cuba and Hispaniola (the Dominican Republic and Haiti); northwest of the Turks and Caicos Islands; southeast of the U.S. state of Florida and east of the Florida Keys. Its capital is Nassau on the island of New Providence. (Source: Wikipedia)
Image Credit: U.S. Astronaut Scott Tingle Release Date: May 15, 2018
The four astronauts who comprise the six-member Expedition 55 crew pose for a portrait inside the International Space Station. They are (clockwise from bottom right) NASA astronauts Ricky Arnold, Scott Tingle and Drew Feustel and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Norishige Kanai.
Saturn near equinox on August 3, 2009. Color-composite made from calibrated raw images captured by Cassini in visible-light filters from 2.2 million kilometers.
Once every 15 years, Saturn's ring system is plunged into a four-day-long night, throwing the orbiting dust particles into startling relief. NASA's Cassini spacecraft measured the coldest temperatures ever observed for the ring system.
The equinox observations can help astronomers better understand the structure and evolution of Saturn's rings, as well as the origin of the solar system.
A section of Saturn's rings are typically in shadow at any given time, experiencing a brief night that lasts from six to 14 hours. But during equinox, that night lasts for four whole days and affects the entire ring system.
Like Earth, Saturn experiences two equinoxes per orbit. During an equinox, each planet's equator lines up edge-on to its orbital plane, causing the sun to appear directly over the equator.
Of course, because Saturn is more distant from the sun, it takes much longer to complete an orbit—29.5 Earth years, to be exact—so there is much more time between equinoxes than on Earth.
As equinox approaches, sunlight fades as the top edge of the solar disk appears to touch the ring (from the perspective of a viewer embedded in the rings). As the solar disk slowly crosses the rings, there is full darkness. Then the bottom edge of the sun rises above the ring planes, about four days after the sunlight originally began to fade.
During equinox, light from the sun hits the ring particles at very low angles, which accentuates their topography, giving a 3-D view.
The Cassini spacecraft ended its mission on Sept. 15, 2017.
The Cassini-Huygens mission was a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, managed the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center was based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Jason Major Caption Credit: http://www.space.com /Jason Major Image Date: August 3, 2009 Release Date: May 14, 2018
Ricky: "The stunning beauty and fragility of our atmosphere is best revealed at dawn, when the sun gently illuminates towering clouds on the distant horizon."
Image Credit: U.S. Astronaut Ricky Arnold Release Date: May 14, 2018
Sand dunes in Valles Marineris can be impressive in size, with steep slopes that seem to climb and descend.
Valles Marineris (Latin for Mariner Valleys, named after the Mariner 9 Mars orbiter of 1971–72 which discovered it) is a system of canyons that runs along the Martian surface east of the Tharsis region. At more than 4,000 km (2,500 mi) long, 200 km (120 mi) wide and up to 7 km (23,000 ft) deep, Valles Marineris is one of the largest canyons of the Solar System, surpassed in length only by the rift valleys of Earth. Valles Marineris is located along the equator of Mars, on the east side of the Tharsis Bulge, and stretches for nearly a quarter of the planet’s circumference. (Source: Wikipedia)
Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona Release Date: May 14, 2018
May 14, 2018: Xianzhe Jia, Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering associate professor at the University of Michigan, has discovered new evidence of plumes on one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa. Using old data with new, Professor Jia and his research team develop models at the University of Michigan to support their findings.
Credit: University of Michigan Engineering Duration: 3 minutes, 41 seconds Release Date: May 14, 2018
[Replay] NASA hosted a Science Chat on May 14, 2018, to discuss the latest analysis of Jupiter’s moon Europa and its status as one of the most promising places in the solar system to search for life.
Europa has long been a high priority for exploration because beneath its icy crust lies a salty, liquid water ocean. NASA’s Europa Clipper, targeted to launch in 2022, will be equipped with the instruments necessary to determine whether Europa possesses the ingredients necessary to support life as we know it.
Quick Facts Type: Icy moon of Jupiter 🌑65% the mass of Earth's Moon 🌐1,939.7 miles in diameter (3,121.6 kilometers) 📅A day = 3.551 Earth days (Orbital Period) Discovered: 1610
Image Description: This image shows two views of the trailing hemisphere of Jupiter's ice-covered satellite, Europa. The left image shows the approximate natural color appearance of Europa. The image on the right is a false-color composite version combining violet, green and infrared images to enhance color differences in the predominantly water-ice crust of Europa.
Overview Beneath the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa is perhaps the most promising place to look for present-day environments suitable for life.
Slightly smaller than Earth's Moon, Europa’s water-ice surface is crisscrossed by long, linear fractures. Like our planet, Europa is thought to have an iron core, a rocky mantle and an ocean of salty water. Unlike Earth, however, Europa’s ocean lies below a shell of ice probably 10 to 15 miles (15 to 25 kilometers) thick and has an estimated depth of 40 to 100 miles (60 to 150 kilometers).
Europa is named for a woman abducted by the god Zeus in Greek mythology–Jupiter to the Romans.
Europa orbits Jupiter every 3.5 days and is locked by gravity to Jupiter, so the same hemisphere of the moon always faces the planet. Because Europa's orbit is elliptical (slightly stretched out from circular), its distance from Jupiter varies, and the moon’s near side feels Jupiter’s gravity more strongly than its far side. The magnitude of this difference changes as Europa orbits, creating tides that stretch and relax the moon’s surface. Flexing from the tides creates the moon’s surface fractures. If Europa's ocean exists, it might also have volcanic or hydrothermal activity on the seafloor, supplying nutrients that could make the ocean suitable for living things.
Based on the small number of observable craters, the surface of this moon appears to be no more than 40 to 90 million years old, which is youthful in geologic terms (the surface of Callisto, another of Jupiter’s moons, is estimated to be a few billion years old). Along Europa's many fractures, and in splotchy patterns across its surface, is a reddish-brown material whose composition is not known, but may hold clues to the moon's potential as a habitable world.
NASA's Galileo spacecraft explored the Jupiter system from 1995 to 2003 and made numerous flybys of Europa. Galileo revealed strange pits and domes that suggest Europa’s surface ice could be slowly turning over, or convecting, due to heat from below. Galileo also found regions called "chaos terrain," where broken, blocky landscapes were covered in the mysterious reddish material. In 2011, scientists studying Galileo data proposed that chaos terrains could be places where the surface collapsed above lens-shaped lakes embedded within the ice.
In 2013, NASA announced that researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope found evidence that Europa might be actively venting water into space, which would mean the moon is geologically active in the present day. If confirmed by follow-up observations, the plumes of water could be studied by future spacecraft similar to how the Cassini spacecraft sampled the plume of Enceladus.
One of the most important measurements made by the Galileo mission showed how Jupiter's magnetic field was disrupted in the space around Europa. The measurement strongly implied that a special type of magnetic field is being created (induced) within Europa by a deep layer of some electrically conductive fluid beneath the surface. Based on Europa's icy composition, scientists think the most likely material to create this magnetic signature is a global ocean of salty water.
Scientists will begin studying Europa anew with the Europa Clipper mission. Scheduled to launch in the 2020s, Europa Clipper would arrive at Jupiter several years later and try to see whether the icy moon could harbor conditions suitable for life. The radiation-tolerant spacecraft will perform 45 flybys of Europa at altitudes varying from 1,675 miles to 16 miles (2,700 kilometers to 25 kilometers) from a long, looping orbit around Jupiter.
Clipper’s instruments will include cameras and spectrometers to produce high-resolution images of Europa's surface and determine its composition. An ice-penetrating radar will determine the thickness of the moon's icy shell and search for subsurface lakes similar to those beneath Antarctica. The mission will also carry a magnetometer to measure strength and direction of the moon's magnetic field, which will allow scientists to determine the depth and salinity of its ocean.
Discovery Galileo Galilei is credited with discovering what we now call the Galilean moons—including Europa—on Jan. 8, 1610. Simon Marius probably made an independent discovery of the moons about the same time that Galileo did, and he may have unwittingly sighted them up to a month earlier, but Galileo was given credit since he published an account of the discovery first
How Europa Got Its Name Europa is named for the daughter of Agenor, in ancient Greek mythology. Europa was abducted by Zeus (the Greek equivalent of the Roman god Jupiter), who had taken the shape of a spotless white bull. Europa was so delighted by the gentle beast that she decked it with flowers and rode upon its back. Seizing his opportunity, Zeus rode away with her into the ocean to the island of Crete, where he transformed back into his true shape. Europa bore Zeus many children, including Minos.
Artist’s illustration of Jupiter and Europa with the Galileo spacecraft after its pass through a plume erupting from Europa
May 14, 2018: Scientists re-examining data from an old mission bring new insights to the tantalizing question of whether Jupiter’s moon Europa has the ingredients to support life. The data provide independent evidence that the moon’s subsurface liquid water reservoir may be venting plumes of water vapor above its icy shell.
Data collected by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in 1997 were put through new and advanced computer models to untangle a mystery—a brief, localized bend in the magnetic field—that had gone unexplained until now. Previous ultraviolet images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 2012 suggested the presence of plumes, but this new analysis used data collected much closer to the source and is considered strong, corroborating support for plumes. The findings appear in Monday’s issue of the journal Nature Astronomy.
The research was led by Xianzhe Jia, a space physicist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and lead author of the journal article. Jia also is co-investigator for two instruments that will travel aboard Europa Clipper, NASA’s upcoming mission to explore the moon’s potential habitability.
“The data were there, but we needed sophisticated modeling to make sense of the observation,” Jia said.
Jia’s team was inspired to dive back into the Galileo data by Melissa McGrath of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. A member of the Europa Clipper science team, McGrath delivered a presentation to fellow team scientists, highlighting other Hubble observations of Europa.
“One of the locations she mentioned rang a bell. Galileo actually did a flyby of that location, and it was the closest one we ever had. We realized we had to go back,” Jia said. “We needed to see whether there was anything in the data that could tell us whether or not there was a plume.”
At the time of the 1997 flyby, about 124 miles (200 kilometers) above Europa’s surface, the Galileo team didn't suspect the spacecraft might be grazing a plume erupting from the icy moon. Now, Jia and his team believe, its path was fortuitous.
When they examined the information gathered during that flyby 21 years ago, sure enough, high-resolution magnetometer data showed something strange. Drawing on what scientists learned from exploring plumes on Saturn’s moon Enceladus—that material in plumes becomes ionized and leaves a characteristic blip in the magnetic field—they knew what to look for. And there it was on Europa—a brief, localized bend in the magnetic field that had never been explained.
Galileo carried a powerful Plasma Wave Spectrometer (PWS) to measure plasma waves caused by charged particles in gases around Europa’s atmosphere. Jia’s team pulled that data as well, and it also appeared to back the theory of a plume.
But numbers alone couldn’t paint the whole picture. Jia layered the magnetometry and plasma wave signatures into new 3D modeling developed by his team at the University of Michigan, which simulated the interactions of plasma with solar system bodies. The final ingredient was the data from Hubble that suggested dimensions of potential plumes.
The result that emerged, with a simulated plume, was a match to the magnetic field and plasma signatures the team pulled from the Galileo data.
“There now seem to be too many lines of evidence to dismiss plumes at Europa," said Robert Pappalardo, Europa Clipper project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. “This result makes the plumes seem to be much more real and, for me, is a tipping point. These are no longer uncertain blips on a faraway image."
The findings are good news for the Europa Clipper mission, which may launch as early as June 2022. From its orbit of Jupiter, Europa Clipper will sail close by the moon in rapid, low-altitude flybys. If plumes are indeed spewing vapor from Europa’s ocean or subsurface lakes, Europa Clipper could sample the frozen liquid and dust particles. The mission team is gearing up now to look at potential orbital paths, and the new research will play into those discussions.
“If plumes exist, and we can directly sample what’s coming from the interior of Europa, then we can more easily get at whether Europa has the ingredients for life,” Pappalardo said. “That’s what the mission is after. That’s the big picture.”
JPL manages the Europa Clipper mission for the agency's Science Mission Directorate.
Image Description: Artist’s illustration of Jupiter and Europa (in the foreground) with the Galileo spacecraft after its pass through a plume erupting from Europa’s surface. A new computer simulation gives us an idea of how the magnetic field interacted with a plume. The magnetic field lines (depicted in blue) show how the plume interacts with the ambient flow of Jovian plasma. The red colors on the lines show more dense areas of plasma.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Michigan Release Date: May 14, 2018
New science, mined from the archives. Data from NASA Galileo orbiter launched a generation ago yields new evidence of plumes, eruptions of water vapor, from Jupiter's moon Europa.
NASA will host a Science Chat at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EDT Monday, May 14), to discuss the latest analysis of Jupiter’s moon Europa and its status as one of the most promising places in the solar system to search for life. The event will air live on NASA Television, including Ustream, YouTube and the agency's website: NASA TV: nasa.gov/nasatv Ustream: www.ustream.tv/nasahdtv NASA Website: www.nasa.gov/live
Image: The puzzling, fascinating surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europa looms large in this newly-reprocessed color view, made from images taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s
Europa has long been a high priority for exploration because beneath its icy crust lies a salty, liquid water ocean. NASA’s Europa Clipper, targeted to launch in 2022, will be equipped with the instruments necessary to determine whether Europa possesses the ingredients necessary to support life as we know it.
Lori Glaze, acting director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, and JoAnna Wendel, the division’s communications lead, will host the chat. Guests include:
Xianzhe Jia, associate professor in the Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Elizabeth Turtle, research scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland Margaret Kivelson, professor emerita of Space Physics in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles The public can send questions on social media by using #AskNASA at any time during the event.
