Important Cargo Headed to International Space Station | This Week@NASA

Important Cargo Headed to International Space Station

This Week@NASA

This Week@NASA | Nov. 2, 2019: Important cargo headed to the space station, installing the thrust behind our return to the Moon, and a devastating wildfire seen from space . . . a few of the stories to tell you about—This Week at NASA!

Credit: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
Duration: 3 minutes, 45 seconds
Release Date: November 2, 2019


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Skywatching: What's Up for November 2019 | NASA/JPL

Skywatching: What's Up for November 2019 | NASA/JPL

Highlights of the November sky include how to watch as Mercury transits the Sun on Nov. 11, plus how to observe the regular dimming and brightening of the "Demon star," Algol, with your own eyes.

Algol animation is licensed as CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Credit NASA-JPL/Caltech
Duration: 3 minutes, 5 seconds
Release Date: November 1, 2019


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NASA's Space to Ground: Continuous Station Presence for 19 Years

NASA's Space to Ground: 

Continuous Station Presence for 19 Years

Week of Nov. 1, 2019: NASA's Space to Ground is your weekly update on what's happening aboard the International Space Station.
A U.S. cargo craft is poised to resupply the International Space Station just days after a Japanese space freighter departed the orbiting lab Friday afternoon. Meanwhile, the Expedition 61 crew today continued an array of microgravity research and spacewalk preparations.

Flight Engineer Christina Koch with back-up support from NASA astronaut Jessica Meir used the Canadarm2 robotic arm to release Japan’s HTV-8 cargo spacecraft at 1:21 p.m. EDT today. The cargo craft spent five weeks attached to the orbiting lab following a Sept. 24 launch from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan.

HTV-8 delivered some five tons of supplies and experiments to the orbital complex as well as new lithium-ion batteries. The batteries were installed in the electronics system of the far port truss of the complex replacing older nickel-hydrogen batteries and upgrading the station’s power supply.

Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus resupply ship sits atop an Antares rocket loaded with 8,200 pounds of science experiments and station hardware. Liftoff will take place on Saturday at 9:59 a.m. EDT from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

Meir and Koch will be in the cupola Monday morning awaiting the arrival of Cygnus. Meir will command the Canadarm2 to reach out and grapple Cygnus at 4:10 a.m. EST. Koch will back up Meir as astronaut Andrew Morgan of NASA monitors Cygnus’ approach and rendezvous.

Morgan and Commander Luca Parmitano of ESA (European Space Agency) are also getting up to speed with repair techniques for an external cosmic particle detector. The duo is reviewing procedures to replace the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer’s (AMS) thermal control system during a series of spacewalks tentatively planned for this month. The AMS measures the charge, velocity and mass of cosmic rays in its search for evidence of dark matter and anti-matter.

Morgan also watered plants and set up biology hardware that will house rodents shipped aboard Cygnus. Parmitano monitored the free-flying Astrobee robotic assistant testing its autonomous ability to perform tasks inside the space station’s Kibo laboratory module.

Cosmonauts Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Skripochka focused on Russian spacecraft work and science in their segment of the space station. The duo charged Soyuz crew ship batteries and packed a Progress cargo craft. Skvortsov then studied how pain adjusts to microgravity while Skripochka moved on to plumbing tasks.

Credit; NASA's Johnson Space Center
Duration: 2 minutes, 25 seconds
Release Date: November 1, 2019


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A 'Ghost' in the Pleiades | Hubble

A 'Ghost' in the Pleiades | Hubble

This ghostly image shows what can happen when an interstellar cloud passes too close to a star. Barnard's Merope Nebula, also known as IC 349, is a cloud of interstellar gas and dust travelling through the Pleiades star cluster at a relative speed of 11 kilometers per second. It is passing close to the star Merope, located 0.06 light years away from the cloud, which is equivalent to about 3 500 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. This passage is disrupting the nebula and creating the wispy effect seen in the image.

Merope is located just out of the frame at the top right. Light from the star is reflected from the surface of the cloud, which illuminates it to become what astronomers call a reflection nebula. The beams of light at the upper right from the star are an effect produced by the telescope but the eerie wisps of light from the lower left to upper right are real.

Astronomers believe that radiation pressure from the star is acting like a sieve to separate dust particles of different sizes. As the nebula approaches Merope, the starlight decelerates dust particles, but the small particles slow down more than the large particles. As an effect, the almost straight lines that are reaching out towards Merope in this view are made of large particles, whereas smaller-sized particles lag behind to create the wispy structure on the lower left.

The nebula will continue its approach towards Merope over the next few thousand years and will eventually move past the star, if it survives. Studying the nebula's interaction with the star is important as it provides a chance to observe interstellar material in an unusual situation and learn more about interstellar dust.

The nebula near Merope was discovered in 1890 by E.E. Barnard using the 36 inch telescope at the Lick Observatory in California. This image was captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope on September 19, 1999 and was originally published in 2000.

Credit: NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), George Herbig and Theodore Simon (University of Hawaii); CC BY 4.0
Image Date: September 19, 1999


#NASA #Hubble #Astronomy #Space #Science #Nebula #Merope #IC349 #Pleiades #Cosmos #Universe #Telescope #ESA #Goddard #GSFC #STScI #STEM #Education

Lonely Hearts Club | Hubble

Lonely Hearts Club | Hubble

Galaxies may seem lonely, floating alone in the vast, inky blackness of the sparsely populated cosmos—but looks can be deceiving. The subject of this Picture of the Week, NGC 1706, is a good example of this. NGC 1706 is a spiral galaxy, about 230 million light-years away, in the constellation of Dorado (The Swordfish).

NGC 1706 is known to belong to something known as a galaxy group, which is just as the name suggests—a group of up to 50 galaxies which are gravitationally bound and hence relatively close to each other. Around half of the galaxies we know of in the Universe belong to some kind of group, making them incredibly common cosmic structures. Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, belongs to the Local Group, which also contains the Andromeda Galaxy, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, and the Triangulum Galaxy.

Groups are the smallest of galactic gatherings; others are clusters, which can comprise hundreds of thousands of galaxies bound loosely together by gravity, and subsequent superclusters, which bring together numerous clusters into a single entity.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Bellini et al.
Release Date: October 28, 2019

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Falling in Fornax | ESO

Falling in Fornax | ESO

This strikingly simple and serene view of NGC 1404—a giant elliptical galaxy located 62 million light-years away in the constellation of Fornax (The Furnace)—hides the galaxy’s cruel reality.

NGC 1404 is one of the galaxies comprising the massive Fornax Cluster—and it is slowly falling inwards towards the cluster’s core. As it moves towards the cluster’s large centermost galaxy, NGC 1399, the galaxy’s reserves of hot gas are being forcibly ripped and stripped away, leaving an elongated tell-tale trail of gas in its wake. While not visible in this image, this gas stream can be seen clearly in X-ray images of the galaxy; in time, NGC 1404 will lose most of its hot gas, and therefore its ability to form new stars.


The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) captured this image of NGC 1404 with its FORS instrument. The bright foreground star to the lower left of the frame is named HD 22862.

Credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO)
Release Date: October 28, 2019


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Inside NASA's Kennedy Space Center! | Week of Oct. 25, 2019

Inside NASA's Kennedy Space Center! | Week of Oct. 25, 2019

The NASA Business Opportunities Expo 2019 attracted about 200 business and government exhibitors. The event, which highlighted women-owned small businesses—and other socioeconomic categories—was held in Port Canaveral. Also, the rock band X Ambassadors toured unique areas around Kennedy Space Center, including Launch Complex 39B and Swamp Works.

Credit: Kennedy Space Center (KSC)
Duration: 1 minute, 58 seconds
Release Date: Oct. 25, 2019


#NASA #Space #Science #Astronomy #SLS #Rocket #Orion #Artemis #Moon #Mars #JourneyToMars #SolarSystem #Exploration #Music #XAmbassadors #Band #Human #Spaceflight #Spacecraft #Kennedy #KSC #Spaceport #Florida #UnitedStates #STEM #Education #Video

International Partnership for the Moon and Mars | This Week @NASA

International Partnership for the Moon and Mars

This Week @NASA

Week of October 25, 2019: International partnerships for the Moon and Mars, an update on that historic all-woman spacewalk, and a milestone for the James Webb Space Telescope . . . a few of the stories to tell you about This Week at NASA!

Credit: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
Duration: 4 minutes, 2 seconds
Release Date: October 25, 2019


#NASA #Space #Astronomy #JWST #ISS #Science #Moon #Mars #JourneyToMars #Artemis #EVA #Spacewalk #History #Astronauts #JessicaMeir #ChristinaKoch #Expedition61 #Human #Spaceflight #Women #Spacecraft #UnitedStates #International #STEM #Education #HD #Video

NASA's Space to Ground: Space Jam | Week of October 25, 2019

NASA's Space to Ground: Space Jam

Week of October 25, 2019

NASA's Space to Ground is your weekly update on what's happening aboard the International Space Station.

The six residents living aboard the International Space Station are busy today ensuring advanced microgravity research continues to provide benefits for citizens on Earth and in space. The Expedition 61 crew is also brushing up on repair techniques for a cosmic particle detector attached to the outside of the orbiting lab.

NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Christina Koch juggled an array of life science activities throughout Thursday. Meir cared for plants for a new field of botany research exploring how to provide fresh food for long-term space crews. Meir later swapped out a failed computer hard drive that supports combustion experiments. Koch organized biology hardware for a study seeking therapies for aging-related conditions. Koch then serviced microbial DNA samples to understand how microorganisms adapt to weightlessness.

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) is due for an upgraded thermal control system after being installed on the outpost’s Starboard-3 truss structure in 2011. NASA is planning a series of spacewalks to restore the AMS-02 to full service. Commander Luca Parmitano of ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA Flight Engineer Andrew Morgan are reviewing the tools and techniques necessary to complete the AMS repair job.

Over in the station’s Russian segment, composed of five modules, a pair of cosmonauts focused on hardware and systems maintenance. Alexander Skvortsov inspected lab windows and checked batteries. Fellow cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka worked on air conditioning and plumbing tasks inside the orbital lab. The duo also explored how to improve accuracy when detecting and photographing Earth landmarks.

Credit: NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC)
Duration: 2 minutes, 59 seconds
Release Date: October 25, 2019


#NASA #Space #ISS #Science #Astronauts #JessicaMeir #ChristinaKoch #AndrewMorgan #ESA #LucaParmitano #Italy #Italia #Expedition61 #Human #Spaceflight #Women #Spacecraft #Houston #Texas #UnitedStates #International #STEM #Education #HD

NASA Astronauts Christina Koch & Jessica Meir Reflect on First All-Woman Spacewalk

NASA Astronauts Christina Koch & Jessica Meir Reflect on First All-Woman Spacewalk

NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir reflect on the historic spacewalk they performed on Oct. 18—the first ever to be conducted by two women. They spent a total of 7 hours and 17 minutes in the vacuum of space. It was Koch’s fourth spacewalk and Meir’s first.

It is the first spaceflight for both women, who were selected in the 2013 astronaut class that had equal numbers of women and men. Koch arrived to the orbiting laboratory in March 2019 and will remain in space for an extended duration mission of 11 months to provide researchers the opportunity to observe effects of long-duration spaceflight on a woman to prepare for human missions to the Moon and Mars.

Meir became the 15th woman to spacewalk, and the 14th U.S. woman. It was the 43rd spacewalk to include a woman. Women have been performing spacewalks since 1984.

Credit: NASA's Johnson Space Center
Duration: 2 minutes, 28 seconds
Release Date: October 23, 2019

#NASA #Space #ISS #Science #EVA #Spacewalk #History #AllWomanSpacewalk #Astronauts #JessicaMeir #ChristinaKoch #AndrewMorgan #ESA #LucaParmitano #Expedition61 #Human #Spaceflight #Women #Spacecraft #UnitedStates #International #STEM #Education

NASA Astronaut Jessica Meir | International Space Station

NASA Astronaut Jessica Meir | International Space Station

Oct. 18, 2019: NASA astronaut Jessica Meir waves at the camera during her first spacewalk with fellow NASA astronaut Christina Koch (out of frame). They ventured into the vacuum of space for seven hours and 17 minutes to swap a failed battery charge-discharge unit (BCDU) with a spare during the first all-woman spacewalk. The BCDU regulates the charge to the batteries that collect and distribute solar power to the orbiting lab’s systems.

Credit: NASA/JSC
Image Date: October 18, 2019


#NASA #Space #ISS #Science #EVA #Spacewalk #History #AllWomanSpacewalk #Astronauts #JessicaMeir #ChristinaKoch #AndrewMorgan #ESA #LucaParmitano #Expedition61 #Human #Spaceflight #Women #Spacecraft #UnitedStates #International #STEM #Education

Reach High | International Space Station

Reach High | International Space Station

Christina: "To all those reaching to new heights: yes you can."

Oct. 18, 2019: NASA astronaut Jessica Meir is pictured during a spacewalk with fellow NASA astronaut Christina Koch (out of frame). They ventured into the vacuum of space for seven hours and 17 minutes to swap a failed battery charge-discharge unit (BCDU) with a spare during the first all-woman spacewalk. The BCDU regulates the charge to the batteries that collect and distribute solar power to the orbiting lab’s systems.

It was the first spacewalk for Meir and the fourth for Koch, who now has spent a total of 27 hours and 48 minutes spacewalking. It is the first spaceflight for both women, who were selected in the 2013 astronaut class that had equal numbers of women and men. Koch arrived to the orbiting laboratory in March 2019 and will remain in space for an extended duration mission of 11 months to provide researchers the opportunity to observe effects of long-duration spaceflight on a woman to prepare for human missions to the Moon and Mars.

Meir became the 15th woman to spacewalk, and the 14th U.S. woman. It was the 43rd spacewalk to include a woman. Women have been performing spacewalks since 1984.

It was the eighth spacewalk outside the station this year. Space station crew members have now conducted 221 spacewalks in support of assembly and maintenance of the orbiting laboratory. Spacewalkers have spent a total of 57 days, 20 hours, and 29 minutes working outside the station.

Credit: NASA/JSC
Image Date: October 18, 2019

#NASA #Space #ISS #Science #EVA #Spacewalk #History #AllWomanSpacewalk #Astronauts #JessicaMeir #ChristinaKoch #AndrewMorgan #ESA #LucaParmitano #Expedition61 #Human #Spaceflight #Women #Spacecraft #UnitedStates #International #STEM #Education

A Fleeting Moment in Time: A Dying Star | ESO

A Fleeting Moment in Time: A Dying Star | ESO

The faint, ephemeral glow emanating from the planetary nebula ESO 577-24 persists for only a short time—around 10,000 years, a blink of an eye in astronomical terms. The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope captured this shell of glowing ionized gas—the last breath of the dying star whose simmering remains are visible at the heart of this image. As the gaseous shell of this planetary nebula expands and grows dimmer, it will slowly disappear from sight.


This stunning planetary nebula was imaged by one of the VLT’s most versatile instruments, FORS2. The instrument captured the bright, central star, Abell 36, as well as the surrounding planetary nebula. The red and blue portions of this image correspond to optical emission at red and blue wavelengths, respectively.

An object much closer to home is also visible in this image—an asteroid wandering across the field of view has left a faint track below and to the left of the central star. And in the far distance behind the nebula a glittering host of background galaxies can be seen.

Credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO)
Release Date: January 22, 2019

#ESO #NASA #Astronomy #Space #Nebula #Planetary #ESO57724 #Star #Abell36 #Cosmos #Universe #Telescope #VLT #FORS2 #Observatory #Chile #Europe #STEM #Education

Starshine in Canis Major | ESO

Starshine in Canis Major | ESO

Distance: 5000 light years

It is impossible to miss the star in this European Southern Observatory (ESO) Picture of the Week—beaming proudly from the center of the frame is the massive multiple star system Tau Canis Majoris, the brightest member of the Tau Canis Majoris Cluster (NGC 2362) in the eponymous constellation of Canis Major (The Great Dog). Tau Canis Majoris aside, the cluster is populated by many young and less attention-seeking stars that are only four or five million years old, all just beginning their cosmic lifetimes.

The Tau Canis Majoris Cluster is an open cluster—a group of stars born from the same molecular cloud. This means that all of the cluster’s inhabitants share a common chemical composition and are loosely bound together by gravity. Having been born together, they make an ideal stellar laboratory to test theories of stellar evolution, the chain of events that leads from a star’s birth in a cool, dense cloud of gas through to its eventual death.

Though the stars in this image were all created at the same time, their various different masses mean they will lead very different lives. As Tau Canis Majoris is one of the most massive and short-lived types of star, it will burn through its nuclear fuel long before its smaller companions, which will keep on shining for billions of years.

This image was created as part of the ESO Cosmic Gems program, an outreach initiative to produce images of interesting, intriguing or visually attractive objects using ESO telescopes, for the purposes of education and public outreach. The program makes use of telescope time that cannot be used for science observations. All data collected may also be suitable for scientific purposes, and are made available to astronomers through ESO’s science archive.

Credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO)
Release Date: March 18, 2019

#ESO #NASA #Astronomy #Space #Stars #NGC2362 #TauCanisMajoris #Cluster #CanisMajor #Cosmos #Universe #Telescope #VLT #ALMA #Observatory #Chile #Europe #STEM #Education

Towers under the Milky Way | ESO

Towers under the Milky Way | ESO

This picture shows in the foreground some of the towers supporting the telescopes that compose BlackGEM. In the background, the magnificent southern Milky Way shines in the sky.

BlackGEM is a wide-field array of optical telescopes located at the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla Observatory in Chile’s Atacama desert.

BlackGEM’s scientific goals are to detect and characterize optical counterparts to gravitational wave detections. To enable this, it will conduct an all-sky survey of the southern sky, perform a bi-weekly scan of the southern sky, and characterize intra-night transients, new stars that appear or disappear within a single night.

Events that produce detectable gravitational waves are expected to occur within approximately 650 million light-years of Earth. Many will therefore be located in or near resolved galaxies and will be faint. It is essential for BlackGEM to have high spatial resolution in order to resolve and accurately locate these sources against the background of the night-sky, making La Silla—with its excellent weather and thin atmosphere—an ideal observing site.

Credit: ESO/P. Horálek
Release Date: October 14, 2019

#ESO #Earth #Astronomy #Space #Science #MilkyWay #Galaxy #Stars #ZodiacalLight #BlackGEM #Telescopes #Cosmos #Universe #Astrophotography #LaSilla #Observatory #Chile #Atacama #Desert #SouthAmerica #Europe #STEM #Education

Inside NASA's Kennedy Space Center! | Week of Oct. 18, 2019

Inside NASA's Kennedy Space Center! | Week of Oct. 18, 2019

Practice makes perfect! Exploration Ground Systems and its contractor, Jacobs, rehearsed lifting procedures of the Space Launch System core stage using a full-scale mock-up, called pathfinder, inside the Vehicle Assembly Building. Kennedy employees recently assembled the flight hardware for NASA's Orbital Syngas Commodity Augmentation Reactor, or OSCAR, inside a laboratory at the center. OSCAR will be used to study technology that converts trash and human waste into useful gasses such as methane, hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

Credit: Kennedy Space Center (KSC)
Duration: 3 minutes
Release Date: October 18, 2019


#NASA #Space #Science #Astronomy #SLS #Rocket #Orion #Artemis #Moon #Mars #JourneyToMars #SolarSystem #Exploration #Human #Spaceflight #Spacecraft #Kennedy #KSC #Spaceport #Florida #UnitedStates #STEM #Education #Video