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Sept. 14, 2018: Cameras outside the International Space Station captured views of Hurricane Florence on Sept. 14 at 7:41 a.m. EDT minutes after the storm made landfall. NASA satellites track the storm: https://go.nasa.gov/2CEmDGQ Florence made landfall near Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina packing winds of 90 miles an hour. The National Hurricane Center said Florence is moving very slowly to the west at only 6 miles an hour, then is expected to turn to the southwest, increasing the threat for historic storm surge and catastrophic flooding to coastline areas and inland cities in North Carolina and South Carolina. Credit: NASA/JSC Duration: 4 minutes, 49 seconds Capture Date: September 14, 2018
Hurricane Florence made landfall near Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina at 7:15 a.m. ET on September 14, 2018, as a Category 1 storm. The GOES East satellite captured this geocolor image of the massive storm at 7:45 a.m. ET, shortly after it moved ashore.
The National Hurricane Center reported Florence had sustained winds of 90 mph at landfall and was moving slowly westward at 6 mph. The storm is expected to slowly begin weakening later today and this evening, but will continue to have significant impacts across the Carolinas.
Life-threatening storm surges and hurricane-force winds are expected to continue even as Florence moves inland, while very heavy rainfall, upwards of 20 inches in some locations, will cause catastrophic flooding across portions of North and South Carolina into the weekend.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is an American scientific agency within the United States Department of Commerce that focuses on the conditions of the oceans, major waterways, and the atmosphere.
This geocolor enhanced imagery was created by NOAA's partners at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA).
Week of Sept. 14, 2018: NASA's Space to Ground is your weekly update on what's happening aboard the International Space Station. Japan is poised to launch its HTV-7 resupply ship, nicknamed the Kounotori, loaded with over five tons of cargo to the International Space Station on Friday, U.S. time. Back on Earth, a new crew is preparing for its launch from Kazakhstan next month to the orbital lab.
JAXA’s (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) H-IIB rocket is set to blast off from the Tanegashima Space Center Friday at 4:59 p.m. EDT and send the Kounotori cargo craft on a four-day ride to the station. Commander Drew Feustel and will be in the Cupola Tuesday, with Flight Engineer Serena Auñón-Chancellor as his backup, to command the Canadarm2 robotic arm to capture the Kounotori at 7:30 a.m. The duo trained Thursday morning on a computer and practiced rendezvous procedures and robotics maneuvers.
Liftoff at 14-minute mark SpaceX launched its second heavyweight Telstar telecommunications satellite from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida early Monday morning, Sept 10, 2018. It then brought the Falcon 9 rocket’s first-stage booster down for a landing on SpaceX's East Coast drone ship, named "Of Course I Still Love You", located hundreds of miles offshore in the Atlantic Ocean.
The SpaceX mission successfully placed the 15,600-pound Telstar 18 Vantage satellite into geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) for Canadian-based Telesat. Telstar 18V will provide constant broadband communications services to China, Mongolia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Ocean region.
Credit: SpaceX Location: Cape Canaveral, Florida, United States Duration: 49 minutes Capture Date: September 10, 2018
SpaceX launched its second heavyweight Telstar telecommunications satellite from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida early Monday morning, Sept 10, 2018. It then brought the Falcon 9 rocket’s first-stage booster down for a landing on SpaceX's East Coast drone ship, named "Of Course I Still Love You", located hundreds of miles offshore in the Atlantic Ocean.
The SpaceX mission successfully placed the 15,600-pound Telstar 18 Vantage satellite into geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) for Canadian-based Telesat. Telstar 18V will provide constant broadband communications services to China, Mongolia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Ocean region.
Credit: SpaceX Location: Cape Canaveral, Florida, United States Image Date: September 10, 2018
The Sun, Our Living Star tells the story of our nearest star—our planet’s powerhouse, the source of energy that drives Earth’s winds and weather, and the ball of light that allows the very existence of life.
The Sun, Our Living Star premiered at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Supernova planetarium from September 7, 2018 and is also available for free download from the ESO website. This video is a Full HD conversion from the original 4K Planetarium format. Download the free show in 4K resolution here: https://www.eso.org/public/videos/The-Sun-show/ English, German and Japanese narrations are available and more languages are planned. The Sun, Our Living Star reveals the impact our star has on every aspect of our lives here on Earth. Explore the Sun’s role in allowing and maintaining life, from photosynthesis to humanity. Discover how the Sun dictates our days, seasons and years. Delve into the history of the Sun’s impact on human religion and culture. Learn about the Sun’s dynamic nature—what appears as a flat disk in the sky is in fact a violent and evolving celestial body, burning 600 million tons of hydrogen every second. The Sun, Our Living Star allows viewers to experience the Sun in a new way, with never-before-seen images of its turbulent surface in immersive fulldome format, revealing its power and variability in breathtaking detail. Credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO)/Matsopoulos Astronomy Duration: 24 minutes, 43 seconds Release Date: September 7, 2018 Film Director: Theofanis Matsopoulos Music & Sound Effects: Konstantino Polizois 3D Animation and Graphics: Theofanis Matsopoulos, Luis Calçada & Martin Kornmesser Producer: Theofanis Matsopoulos & the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Executive Producer: Lars Lindberg Christensen Script and Scientific Advice: Lars Lindberg Christensen, Ryan Wyatt, Nicolas Matsopoulos, Adam Hadhazy, Rebecca Davies, Carl Mundy & Paola Amico Narration: Sara Mendes Da Costa Audio mastering: George Deligiannis
ESA Astronaut Alexander Gerst: "California dreaming. One of my favourite orbits is down along the West Coast of USA, from Alaska to the Andes. We fly this route once a day."
"California dreaming. Einer meiner Lieblingsorbits geht von Alaska entlang der Westküste der USA bis über die Anden. Wir fliegen diese Route jeden Tag einmal."
Sept. 6, 2018: Astronomers have used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to discover a ring of X-ray power. This ring sounds like it might belong in Tolkien's Middle Earth, but it is, in fact, found in a galaxy about 300 million light years from Earth. The galaxy called AM 0644-741 is what astronomers refer to as a "ring" galaxy. Taking a look at the image quickly reveals why. Astronomers think ring galaxies are formed when one galaxy smashes into another in a catastrophic collision. The impact generates ripples in the interstellar gas of the targeted galaxy. These ripples, in turn, trigger new waves of star formation as gas expands outward from the site of the collision.
The most massive of these fledgling stars will lead short lives—in cosmic terms—of millions of years. After that, their nuclear fuel is spent and the stars explode as supernovas leaving behind either black holes with masses less than about a hundred times that of the Sun, or neutron stars with a mass approximately equal to one and a half times of the Sun.
Some of these black holes and neutron stars have closecompanion stars, and siphon gas from their stellar partner. This gas falls towards the black hole or neutron star, forming a spinning disk like water circling a drain, and becomes heated by friction. This superheated gas produces large amounts of X-rays that Chandra can detect.
Astronomers are on a quest to study AM 0644-741 and others like it to better understand the origins of ring galaxies and the intriguing objects that they contain.
Credit: NASA Chandra Duration: 2 minutes, 40 seconds Release Date: September 6, 2018
What happens when one galaxy punches through another? Astronomers have used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to discover a ring of black holes or neutron stars in a galaxy 300 million light years from Earth. This ring, while not wielding power over Middle Earth, may help scientists better understand what happens when galaxies smash into one another in catastrophic impacts.
In this new composite image of the galaxy AM 0644-741 (AM 0644 for short), X-rays from Chandra (purple) have been combined with optical data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (red, green, and blue). The Chandra data reveal the presence of very bright X-ray sources, most likely binary systems powered by either a stellar-mass black hole or neutron star, in a remarkable ring.
Where did the ring of black holes or neutron stars in AM 0644 come from? Astronomers think that it was created when one galaxy was pulled into another galaxy by the force of gravity. The first galaxy generated ripples in the gas of the second galaxy, AM 0644, located in the lower right. These ripples then produced an expanding ring of gas in AM 0644 that triggered the birth of new stars. The first galaxy is possibly the one located in the lower left of the image.
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.
Image Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/INAF/A. Wolter et al Optical: NASA/STScI Release Date: September 6, 2018
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.
After snagging a new rock sample on Aug. 9, NASA's Curiosity rover surveyed its surroundings on Mars, producing a 360-degree panorama of its current location on Vera Rubin Ridge.
The panorama includes umber skies, darkened by a fading global dust storm. It also includes a rare view by the Mast Camera of the rover itself, revealing a thin layer of dust on Curiosity's deck. In the foreground is the rover's most recent drill target, named "Stoer" after a town in Scotland near where important discoveries about early life on Earth were made in lakebed sediments.
The new drill sample delighted Curiosity's science team, because the rover's last two drill attempts were thwarted by unexpectedly hard rocks. Curiosity started using a new drill method earlier this year to work around a mechanical problem. Testing has shown it to be as effective at drilling rocks as the old method, suggesting the hard rocks would have posed a problem no matter which method was used.
There's no way for Curiosity to determine exactly how hard a rock will be before drilling it, so for this most recent drilling activity, the rover team made an educated guess. An extensive ledge on the ridge was thought to include harder rock, able to stand despite wind erosion; a spot below the ledge was thought more likely to have softer, erodible rocks. That strategy seems to have panned out, but questions still abound as to why Vera Rubin Ridge exists in the first place.
The rover has never encountered a place with so much variation in color and texture, according to Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity's project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the Mars Science Laboratory mission that Curiosity is a part of.
"The ridge isn't this monolithic thing—it has two distinct sections, each of which has a variety of colors," Vasavada said. "Some are visible to the eye and even more show up when we look in near-infrared, just beyond what our eyes can see. Some seem related to how hard the rocks are."
The best way to discover why these rocks are so hard is to drill them into a powder for the rover's two internal laboratories. Analyzing them might reveal what's acting as "cement" in the ridge, enabling it to stand despite wind erosion. Most likely, Vasavada said, groundwater flowing through the ridge in the ancient past had a role in strengthening it, perhaps acting as plumbing to distribute this wind-proofing "cement."
Much of the ridge contains hematite, a mineral that forms in water. There's such a strong hematite signal that it drew the attention of NASA orbiters like a beacon. Could some variation in hematite result in harder rocks? Is there something special in the ridge's red rocks that makes them so unyielding?
For the moment, Vera Rubin Ridge is keeping its secrets to itself.
Two more drilled samples are planned for the ridge in September. After that, Curiosity will drive to its scientific end zone: areas enriched in clay and sulfate minerals higher up Mt. Sharp. That ascent is planned for early October.
Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, built and operates the Mastcam. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed and built the project's Curiosity rover.
The Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft is pictured docked to the Rassvet module on the Russian segment of the International Space Station as the orbital complex was flying 253 miles above the North Pacific Ocean south of Alaska's Aleutian Islands.
The Aleutian Islands are a chain of 14 large volcanic islands and 55 smaller ones belonging to both the U.S. state of Alaska and the Russian federal subject of Kamchatka Krai. They form part of the Aleutian Arc in the Northern Pacific Ocean, occupying an area of 6,821 sq mi (17,666 km2) and extending about 1,200 mi (1,900 km) westward from the Alaska Peninsula toward the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, and mark a dividing line between the Bering Sea to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the south. (Source: Wikipedia)
Note: "Based on mean radius. Some moons are subpixel in size, but appear to occupy a single pixel. Moons considerably smaller than a pixel have been omitted. Units are in kilometers."
Credits: Image Processing & Layout: Kevin M. Gill Cassini: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS New Horizons: NASA/SwRI/JHAPL Juno: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS ISRO Mars Orbiter Mission: ISRO/ISSDC Voyager, Galileo: NASA/JPL-Caltech Rosetta: ESA/MPS/OSIRIS Team MESSENGER: NASA/JHUAPL/Carnegie Institution of Washington Akatsuki: JAXA/ISAS/DARTS
