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NASA Astronaut Sunita Williams | The Miracle Planet
In this week’s episode of Down to Earth: Conversations, Suni and Adrien discuss protecting our planet’s environment and give their closing thoughts on their conversation.
NASA Astronaut Sunita Williams Spaceflight Experience:
Expedition 14/15 (December 9, 2006 to June 22, 2007)
Expedition 32/33 (July 14 to November 18, 2012)
NASA Astronaut Sunita Williams Official Biography:
NASA's Student Rocket Launch Competition Returns to Alabama Sky
Following two years of virtual events, middle school, high school, and college teams from across the United States returned to Bragg Farms in Toney, Alabama, to compete in NASA's Student Launch rocketry competition April 23, 2022. They flew high-powered amateur rockets that they designed, built, and tested.
Elliptical Galaxy NGC 541 Fuels an Irregular Galaxy | Hubble
Image Description: Center, right: Bright, white elliptical galaxy with very bright core from which a diffuse glow extends outward. Another bright, smaller/more distant galaxy is below it, while bright blue/white irregular is to its lower left.
This striking pair is an elliptical galaxy NGC 541 and an unusual star-forming, irregular dwarf galaxy known as Minkowski’s Object (the bluish object to the lower left of NGC 541). Elliptical galaxies are nearly spherical to egg-shaped groups of stars that form when galaxies merge. NGC 541 shoots out radio jets that are invisible to human eyes but detectable by radio telescopes. These jets originate in the accretion disk around the galaxy’s central black hole.
The radio jet from NGC 541 likely caused the star-formation in Minkowski’s Object. Radio galaxies like NGC 541 are surrounded by gaseous halos and/or debris from recent merger events—which may have triggered the radio galaxy activity in the first place. The jet plows into the moderately dense, warm gas around the galaxy and the shock compresses and heats the gas, causing it to become energized, or ionized. As the ionized gas reverts from its higher-energy state to a lower-energy state, energy leaves the cloud in the form of radiation. As the clouds cool, they collapse, giving rise to starbirth. Minkowski’s Object is about 7.5 million years old and consists of about 20 million stars.
Hubble observed Minkowski’s Object and NGC 541 to get a better sense of how star formation occurs in this region, what kind of star formation takes place, and the properties of the jet that triggers it.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and S. Croft (Eureka Scientific Inc.); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA Goddard/Catholic University of America)
Space Frost on Window | International Space Station
This unique image was captured by Cosmonaut Sergey Korsakov aboard the International Space Station.
Expedition 67 Crew
Commander Oleg Artemyev (Russia)
Roscosmos Flight Engineers: Denis Matveev and Sergey Korsakov (Russia)
NASA Flight Engineers: Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines, Jessica Watkins (USA)
European Space Agency (ESA) Flight Engineer: Samantha Cristoforetti (Italy)
An international partnership of space agencies provides and operates the elements of the International Space Station (ISS). The principals are the space agencies of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada. The ISS has been the most politically complex space exploration program ever undertaken.
James Webb Space Telescope Instrument Overview | NASA Goddard
An overview of the instruments onboard the Webb Telescope: the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), and the Fine Guidance Sensor/Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph. Learn how each instrument will help Webb unfold the universe.
Learn more about Webb’s mission: http://webb.nasa.gov
Learn more about the search for life: http://astrobiology.nasa.gov
United Launch Alliance Atlas V OFT-2 Starliner Launch Highlights
A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket carrying Boeing's CST-100 Starliner spacecraft on Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) to the International Space Station as part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program lifted off on May 19 at 6:54 p.m. EDT from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
Northrop Grumman & NASA's Lunar Gateway: Preparing for Moon Exploration
"Listen to our very own Rick Mastracchio, a former NASA astronaut, as he talks about our contributions to NASA's Lunar Gateway, including our work on the Habitation and Logistics Outpost—humanity’s first home away from Earth as we begin to explore the Moon and the rest of our solar system with NASA’s Artemis program."
Globular Cluster Liller 1 Surrounded by Blue Stars | Hubble
The muted red tones of the globular cluster Liller 1 are partially obscured in this image by a dense scattering of piercingly blue stars. In fact, it is thanks to Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) that we are able to see Liller 1 so clearly in this image, because the WFC3 is sensitive to wavelengths of light that the human eye cannot detect. Liller 1 is only 30,000 light-years from Earth—relatively neighborly in astronomical terms—but it lies within the Milky Way’s ‘bulge’, the dense and dusty region at our galaxy’s center. Because of that, Liller 1 is heavily obscured from view by interstellar dust, which scatters visible light (particularly blue light) very effectively.
Fortunately, some infrared and red visible light are able to pass through these dusty regions. WFC3 is sensitive to both visible and near-infrared (infrared that is close to the visible) wavelengths, allowing us to see through the obscuring clouds of dust, and providing this spectacular view of Liller 1.
Liller 1 is a particularly interesting globular cluster, because unlike most of its kind, it contains a mix of very young and very old stars. Globular clusters typically house only old stars, some nearly as old as the Universe itself. Liller 1 instead contains at least two distinct stellar populations with remarkably different ages: the oldest one is 12 billion years old and the youngest component is just 1-2 billion years old. This led astronomers to conclude that this stellar system was able to form stars over an extraordinary long period of time.
Credit:
European Space Agency (ESA)/Hubble & NASA, F. Ferraro
The Astromaterials Laboratory at NASA's Johnson Space Center
For more than 50 years, NASA astronauts and scientists have explored the Earth and sky, searching for ways to study the elements and materials that make up the Solar System. NASA’s Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Division, or ARES is responsible to preserve lunar and other samples for current and future scientific research. The samples are protected inside secure and environmentally controlled vaults. As part of the agency’s Artemis program, NASA is preparing to go back to the Moon, this time to the South Pole. Astronauts will bring back more samples for current and future generations to study.
Five Canadian Astronauts Share Their Experiences | McGill University
Since 1983, 14 Canadians have been named astronauts, including five McGill University graduates. This public talk features "McGill astronauts" Julie Payette, David Saint-Jacques, Robert Thirsk and Dave Williams—plus special guest Montreal astronaut Marc Garneau—discussing the contributions they have made to the fields of space/aerospace and the exploration of the universe. Hear them share their adventures in space and their experiences at McGill!
Learn about Canada's astronauts (past and present):
A Dazzling Hubble Collection of Supernova Host Galaxies
Spanning from 2003 to 2021, this featured collection of images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope includes galaxies that are all hosts to both Cepheid variables and supernovae. These two celestial phenomena are both crucial tools used by astronomers to determine astronomical distance, and have been used to refine our measurement of Hubble’s constant, the expansion rate of the Universe.
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures the spiral galaxy NGC 105, which lies roughly 215 million light-years away in the constellation Pisces. While it looks like NGC 105 is plunging edge-on into a collision with a neighboring galaxy, this is just the result of the chance alignment of the two objects in the night sky. NGC 105’s elongated neighbor is actually far more distant and remains relatively unknown to astronomers. These misleading conjunctions occur frequently in astronomy—for example, the stars in constellations are at vastly different distances from Earth, and only appear to form patterns thanks to the chance alignment of their component stars.
The Wide Field Camera 3 observations in this image are from a vast collection of Hubble measurements examining nearby galaxies which contain two fascinating astronomical phenomena—Cepheid variables and cataclysmic supernova explosions. Whilst these two phenomena may appear to be unrelated—one is a peculiar class of pulsating stars and the other is the explosion caused by the catastrophic final throes of a massive star’s life—they are both used by astronomers for a very particular purpose: measuring the vast distances to astronomical objects. Both Cepheids and supernovae have very predictable luminosities, meaning that astronomers can tell precisely how bright they are. By measuring how bright they appear when observed from Earth, these “standard candles” can provide reliable distance measurements. NGC 105 contains both supernovae and Cepheid variables, giving astronomers a valuable opportunity to calibrate the two distance measurement techniques against one another.
Astronomers recently carefully analysed the distances to a sample of galaxies including NGC 105 to measure how fast the Universe is expanding—a value known as the Hubble constant. Their results do not agree with the predictions of the most widely-accepted cosmological model, and their analysis shows that there is only a 1-in-a-million chance that this discrepancy was caused by measurement errors. This discrepancy between galaxy measurements and cosmological predictions has been a long-standing source of consternation for astronomers, and these recent findings provide persuasive new evidence that something is either wrong or lacking in our standard model of cosmology.
Boeing Starliner Meets Crew Aboard International Space Station for First Time
Astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station entered Boeing's Starliner spacecraft for the first time today. The crew welcomed the spacecraft and began unloading the cargo.
Boeing's Starliner and SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft have been developed and tested to fly astronauts to and from the International Space Station from U.S. soil.
Boeing Starliner Hatch Opening & Welcoming Remarks | International Space Station
[Crew Remarks on Historic Importance at 1 hour, 33 minute mark]
Following launch on May 19, 2022, and docking on May 20, the hatch of the Boeing Starliner vehicle was opened for the first time. NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines, and Jessica Watkins as well as European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti of Italy and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Korsakov, Space Station Commander, Oleg Artemyev, and Denis Matveev provided welcoming remarks during an in-flight event on May 21. Starliner will complete a series of test objectives as part of the OFT-2 test flight and will remain docked to the space station until May 25, 2022, when it will undock and land at White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico.
Boeing's Starliner and SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft have been developed and tested to fly astronauts to and from the International Space Station from U.S. soil.
Artemis: From The Moon to Mars—A New Era for Human Spaceflight | NASA
Forward to the Moon and on to Mars, NASA is exploring deep space like never before. Preparing to launch soon, Artemis I will be the first uncrewed flight test of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the Orion spacecraft around the Moon. We will use what we learn on and around the Moon to take the next giant leap: sending the first astronauts to Mars.
Through Artemis, NASA aims to land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon, heralding a new era for space exploration and utilization.
The Artemis missions are increasingly complex endeavours that will lay the foundation for sustainable human and robotic exploration of Earth's only natural satellite, the Moon.
The first in a series of increasingly complex missions, Artemis I will be an uncrewed flight test in 2022 that will provide a foundation for human deep space exploration, and demonstrate NASA's commitment and capability to extend human existence to the Moon and beyond. It will travel 280,000 miles from Earth, thousands of miles beyond the Moon over the course of about a three-week mission. Orion will stay in space longer than any ship for astronauts has done without docking to a space station and return home faster and hotter than ever before.