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Cameras outside the International Space Station captured views of Tropical Storm Gordon at 11:30 a.m. EDT Sept. 4 from an altitude of 255 miles as the storm churned over the northern Gulf of Mexico moving northwest at 15 miles an hour. Gordon was expected to make landfall tonight as a category 1 hurricane over the southeast Louisiana or southwestern Mississippi coastline. Credit: NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) Duration: 2 minutes, 52 seconds Release Date: September 4, 2018
Processed using calibrated red, green, and blue filtered images of Saturn taken by the Cassini spacecraft on August 21, 2015.
Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second-largest in the Solar System, after Jupiter. It is a gas giant with an average radius about nine times that of Earth. It has only one-eighth the average density of Earth, but with its larger volume, Saturn is over 95 times more massive. Saturn is a gas giant because it is predominantly composed of hydrogen and helium. It lacks a definite surface, though it may have a solid core. (Source: Wikipedia)
The Cassini spacecraft ended its mission on Sept. 15, 2017.
The Cassini mission was a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
In August 2018, long, narrow clouds stood out against the backdrop of marine clouds blanketing much of the North Pacific Ocean. Known as ship tracks, the distinctive clouds form when water vapor condenses around the tiny particles emitted by ships in their exhaust. Ship tracks typically form in areas where thin, low-lying stratus and cumulus clouds are present.
Some particles generated by ships (especially sulfates) are soluble in water and serve as the seeds around which cloud droplets form. Clouds infused with ship exhaust have more and smaller droplets than unpolluted clouds. As a result, the light hitting the polluted clouds scatters in many directions, making them appear especially bright and thick.
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua Earth satellite captured this natural-color image of several ship tracks extending northward on August 26, 2018. The clouds were located about 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) west of the California-Oregon border. Similar environmental conditions also triggered the formation of ship tracks in this part of the Pacific on August 27 and 28.
An analysis of one year of satellite observations from the Advanced Along Track Scanning Radiometer (AATSR) on the European Space Agency’s Enivisat indicates that very low clouds are most often present off the west coasts of North and South America.
The large number of ships traversing the North Pacific, combined with all of the low clouds, make ship tracks more common here than anywhere else in the world. Roughly two-thirds of the world’s ship tracks are found in the Pacific, according to the study. Other ship track hotspots were in the North Atlantic, off the west coast of southern Africa, and off the west coast of South America.
The research team also detected a clear seasonality in their occurrence: they are most often observed in May, June, and July, and only occasionally present in December, January, and February. Ship traffic is roughly constant throughout the year, so the cycle is mostly due to seasonal changes in the abundance of very low clouds.
Image Credit: NASA/Lauren Dauphin/Adam Voiland/Bastiaan van Diedenhoven (NASA GISS) Release Date: September 4, 2018
Over the course of just one day a tiny active region grew to became almost as large as its many-days-old neighbor (Aug. 23-24, 2018). Active regions, which are areas of intense magnetism, appear brighter in wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light and are often the source of solar storms.
Credit: Solar Dynamics Observatory, NASA Image Date: August 24, 2018 Release Date: September 4, 2018
ESA Astronaut Alexander Gerst: "Another concerning sight from orbit. Paris surrounded by brown fields, like much of Europe was this summer." Follow Alexander and his Horizons mission: http://bit.ly/AlexanderGerstESA and on http://bit.ly/HorizonsBlogESA
Credit: ESA/NASA-A.Gerst Image Date: August 6, 2018
ESA Astronaut Alexander Gerst: "Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said one does not need to travel around the world to understand that the sky is blue everywhere. I'm not so sure..."
Blauer Himmel? "Um zu begreifen, daß der Himmel überall blau ist, braucht man nicht um die Welt zu reisen. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe). Vielleicht doch...?"
This week’s NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image showcases the galaxy NGC 4036: a lenticular galaxy some 70 million light-years away in the constellation of Ursa Major (the Great Bear). This galaxy is known for its irregular lanes of dust, which form a swirling spiral pattern around the center of the galaxy. This core is surrounded by an extended, hazy aura of gas and dust that stretches further out into space and causes the warm, fuzzy glow that can be seen here. The center itself is also intriguing; it is something known as a LINER-type (Low-Ionization Nuclear Emission-line Region) galactic nucleus, meaning that it displays particular emission lines within its spectrum. The particularly bright star visible slightly to the right of the galactic center is not within the galaxy itself; it sits between us and NGC 4036, adding a burst of brightness to the scene.
Due to its relative brightness, this galaxy can be seen using an amateur telescope, making it a favorite among backyard astronomers and astrophotography aficionados.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt Release Date: September 3, 2018
The Orion pressure vessel for Exploration Mission-2 arrived at Kennedy Space Center. The mobile launcher for NASA’s Space Launch System rocket was transported to Launch Pad 39B atop crawler-transporter-2 for system checkouts. Teams from various NASA centers supporting the Commercial Crew Program met at Kennedy to review launch and landing operations as Boeing and SpaceX gear up for their flight tests.
Credit: NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) Duration: 1 minute, 28 seconds Release Date: August 31, 2018
Learn about the first flights of Boeing’s Starliner and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon with and without astronauts on board, and what they will accomplish for NASA and its commercial partners. Learn more about NASA’s Commercial Crew Program at: https://www.nasa.gov/commercialcrew
Aug. 31, 2018: New Horizons spots its next flyby target, Administrator Bridenstine visits our west coast facilities, and using data from space to fight a life-threatening disease…a few of the stories to tell you about—This Week at NASA! Learn more about the NASA New Horizons mission: http://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons
Credit: NASA Duration: 3 minutes, 37 seconds Release Date: August 31, 2018
Aug. 31, 2018: NASA's Space to Ground is your weekly update on what's happening aboard the International Space Station. Learn more about the important research being operated on Station: https://www.nasa.gov/iss-science
Credit: NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) Duration: 2 minutes, 6 seconds Release Date: August 31, 2018
Intricate swirls in Jupiter's volatile northern hemisphere are captured in this color-enhanced image from NASA's Juno spacecraft. Bursts of bright-white "pop-up" clouds appear scattered throughout the scene, with some visibly casting shadows on the neighboring cloud layers beneath them. Juno scientists are using shadows to determine the distances between cloud layers in Jupiter's atmosphere, which provide clues to their composition and origin.
This image was taken at 10:27 p.m. PDT on May 23, 2018 (1:27 a.m. EDT on May 24) as the spacecraft performed its 13th close flyby of Jupiter. At the time, Juno was about 7,050 miles (11,350 kilometers) from the planet's cloud tops, above a northern latitude of approximately 49 degrees.
Citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran created this image using data from the spacecraft's JunoCam imager.
JunoCam's raw images are available at www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam for the public to peruse and process into image products.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages JPL for NASA.
Credit: NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Image Date: May 23, 2018 Release Date: August 30, 2018
In September, your binoculars will reveal the rusty surface of Mars, iconic rings of Saturn, the waxing Moon—and Comet Giacobini-Zinner, which passes through the constellation of Auriga. “Tonight’s Sky” is produced by HubbleSite.org, online home of the Hubble Space Telescope.
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 (SSI) in Boulder, Colorado.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS/Kevin M. Gill Image Date: March 29, 2016 Release Date: August 30, 2018
What's up in the night sky for September? Outstanding views of the planets. Spot Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Mars with the naked eye. Then, set your sights beyond the solar system and take a late summertime road-trip of the constellations along the Milky Way. For star parties and astronomy events near you, visit: https://nightsky.jpl.nasa.gov/
