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Zooming to Taurus Molecular Cloud—Star Formation Region | ESO
The Taurus molecular cloud (TMC-1) is an interstellar molecular cloud in the constellations Taurus and Auriga. This cloud hosts a stellar nursery containing hundreds of newly formed stars. The Taurus molecular cloud is only ~430 light years away from Earth, making it possibly the nearest large star formation region. It has been important in star formation studies at all wavelengths.
Taurus Molecular Cloud: Star Formation Region | ESO
The Taurus molecular cloud (TMC-1) is an interstellar molecular cloud in the constellations Taurus and Auriga. This cloud hosts a stellar nursery containing hundreds of newly formed stars. The Taurus molecular cloud is only ~430 light years away from Earth, making it possibly the nearest large star formation region. It has been important in star formation studies at all wavelengths.
NASA Artemis II Spacecraft Moon Mission Recovery Test in Pacific Ocean
The Crew Module Test Article (CMTA) is seen in the waters of the Pacific Ocean during NASA’s Underway Recovery Test 10 (URT-10).
Members of NASA’s Landing and Recovery team load a mannequin into the Crew Module Test Article (CMTA) during Underway Recovery Test 10 in the Pacific Ocean.
Navy divers from Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Expeditionary Support Unit 1 prepare to enter the Pacific Ocean from the well deck of USS John P Murtha
The Artemis II Crew Module Test Article (CMTA) is seen in the waters of the Pacific Ocean during NASA’s Underway Recovery Test 10 (URT-10). The CMTA is a full-scale mockup of the Orion spacecraft and is used by NASA and its Department of Defense partners to practice recovery procedures for crewed Artemis missions. URT-10 is the first test specifically in support of the Artemis II mission and allowed the team to practice what it will be like to recover astronauts and get them back to the recovery ship safely.
Artemis II will be NASA’s first crewed flight test of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft around the Moon to verify today’s capabilities for humans to explore deep space and pave the way for long-term exploration and science on the lunar surface.
2023 Student Rocket Launch Highlights | United Launch Alliance
The 2023 Student Rocket Launch took place on Saturday, July 15, 2023, at the Hudson Ranch Rocket Launch Site in Pueblo, Colorado, USA. Summer interns at many United Launch Alliance (ULA) sites have the option to design, build, refurbish and launch sport rockets. The tradition began in Colorado and branched out to interns across the company supporting multi-year rocket projects. Now, volunteer interns and mentors build rockets at their own sites—a hands-on opportunity to work with hardware and get to know more experienced industry professionals.
Interns of all backgrounds, experience levels and job function can participate—mentors work with everyone to create safe, hands-on experiences for everyone.
"Star Stuff": Where Elements in Our Bodies Come From | ESO
Chasing Starlight Episode 3: You have probably heard that "We are made of star stuff." This phrase was coined by American astronomer, Carl Sagan, fifty years ago and has since made it into pop culture. Is it really true? And what does it mean? In this episode, you will discover where and how the elements in the human body were born.
00:00 Introduction
01:21 The Big Bang: Hydrogen
02:23 A Star is Born
03:38 The Beginning of the End: Carbon and Oxygen
04:31 Making Stardust
06:19 Enriching Ending: Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Calcium
Hubble Sees Evaporating Planet Getting "The Hiccups" | NASA Goddard
A young planet whirling around a petulant red dwarf star about 32 light years away in the constellation Microscopium is changing in unpredictable ways orbit-by-orbit. It is so close to its parent star that it experiences a consistent, torrential blast of energy, which evaporates its hydrogen atmosphere—causing it to puff off the planet.
However, during one orbit observed with the Hubble Space Telescope, the planet looked like it was not losing any material at all, while an orbit observed with Hubble a year and a half later showed clear signs of atmospheric loss.
Video Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Paul Morris: Lead Producer
Cassandra Morris: Narrator
Animation Credit:
Light interacting with atmosphere: ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser
Escaping atmosphere of an exoplanet: ESA/Hubble, NASA, M. Kornmesser
Planet orbiting a red dwarf star (artist's impression): ESA/Hubble (M. Kornmesser)
Red Dwarf Flare Star (Artist's Illustration): NASA, ESA, and D. Player (STScI)
[No Audio] The aurora australis or southern lights over the U.S. South Pole Telescope (SPT) during an active period. Auroras are produced when the Earth's magnetosphere is sufficiently disturbed by the solar wind that the trajectories of charged particles in both solar wind and magnetospheric plasma, mainly in the form of electrons and protons, precipitate them into the upper atmosphere (thermosphere/exosphere) due to Earth's magnetic field, where their energy is lost. The resulting ionization and excitation of atmospheric constituents emits light of varying color and complexity. [Wikipedia]
The South Pole Telescope (SPT) is a submillimeter observatory in Antarctica that performs measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and the dark energy driving the acceleration of the universe's expansion. The observatory is also part of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a globe-spanning multi-telescope project that captured the first image of a black hole at the center of a nearby galaxy. The SPT project is a collaboration between the University of Chicago, the University of California at Berkeley, Case Western Reserve University, the University of Illinois, and the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian.
SPT is a 10-meter telescope designed to measure tiny CMB temperature ripples in submillimeter or microwave light, between infrared and radio on the spectrum of light. Its capabilities also make it an important node in the EHT, which collects submillimeter light emitted by matter just before it falls into a supermassive black hole.
In these images, a Northop Grumman Cygnus spacecraft is integrated with the Antares rocket in the Horizontal Integration Facility at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Northrop Grumman’s 19th contracted cargo resupply mission with NASA to the International Space Station will deliver more than 8,200 pounds of science and research, crew supplies and vehicle hardware to the orbital laboratory and its crew. The CRS-19 Cygnus spacecraft is named after NASA astronaut Dr. Laurel Clark who flew aboard Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-107), and is scheduled to launch no earlier than 8:31 p.m. EDT, Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2023.
South of Antares, in the tail of the nebula-rich constellation Scorpius, lies emission nebula IC 4628. Nearby hot, massive stars, millions of years young, irradiate the nebula with invisible ultraviolet light, stripping electrons from atoms. The electrons eventually recombine with the atoms to produce the visible nebular glow, dominated by the red emission of hydrogen. At an estimated distance of 6,000 light-years, the region shown is about 250 light-years across, spanning over three full moons on the sky. The nebula is also cataloged as Gum 56 for Australian astronomer Colin Stanley Gum, but seafood-loving deep sky-enthusiasts might know this cosmic cloud as the Prawn Nebula. This graceful color image is a new astronomical composition taken over several nights in April 2023 from Rio Hurtado, Chile.
NASA's "Espacio a Tierra" | Sr. 300: 21 de julio de 2023
Espacio a Tierra, la versión en español de las cápsulas Space to Ground de la NASA, te informa semanalmente de lo que está sucediendo en la Estación Espacial Internacional.
Meet the Perseverance Rover's Mars Samples: Swift Run & Skyland | NASA/JPL
Meet two of the Martian samples that have been collected and are awaiting return to Earth as part of the Mars Sample Return campaign. As of late June 2023, NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover has collected and sealed 20 scientifically selected samples inside pristine tubes. The next stage is to get them back for study.
Considered one of the highest priorities by the scientists in the Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey 2023-2032, Mars Sample Return would be the first mission to return samples from another planet and provides the best opportunity to reveal the early evolution of Mars, including the potential for ancient life. NASA is teaming with the European Space Agency (ESA) on this important endeavor.
Learn more about Samples No. 10 and 11—“Swift Run” and “Skyland,” the first rock samples collected by the Perseverance rover from an ancient river delta environment on Mars. Scientists are particularly excited about studying such sedimentary rock samples up close because they form through interaction with liquid water and may have good potential for preserving signs of ancient life.
A key objective for Perseverance's mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover characterizes the planet's geology and past climate, paves the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and is the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).
Rover Name: Perseverance
Main Job: Seek signs of ancient life and collect samples of rock and regolith (broken rock and soil) for possible return to Earth.
Unexpectedly Calm & Remote Galaxy Cluster Discovered | NASA Chandra
Astronomers have discovered the most distant galaxy cluster with an important quality—paving the way to learning how and when some of these gigantic structures form and why the universe looks like it does in the present day.
To find this distant and unusually young galaxy cluster, teams of scientists used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory along with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, the South Pole Telescope, and the Dark Energy Survey project in Chile.
The cluster’s important quality is that it is “relaxed”, meaning that it is not being disrupted by violent collisions with other clusters of galaxies. This galaxy cluster, called SPT-CL J2215-3537 (or SPT2215 for short), is about 8.4 billion light-years from Earth. This means our telescopes see it when the universe is only 5.3 billion years old, compared to its current age of 13.8 billion years.
Astronomers think that galaxy clusters—enormous structures filled with individual galaxies, huge amounts of hot gas, and dark matter. In the case of SPT2215, researchers estimate that it has a mass some 700 trillion times that of the sun. Scientists think that galaxy clusters usually grow by merging with other clusters and smaller groups of galaxies over billions of years. This would have been especially true when the universe was younger. It was, therefore, surprising to find SPT2215 at its large distance from Earth. In other words, this discovery suggests that SPT2215 has become relaxed earlier than expected for a typical galaxy cluster.
Another interesting aspect of SPT2215 is the evidence for large amounts of star formation happening in its center. SPT2215 has a very large galaxy in its middle, which in turn has a supermassive black hole at its core. The prodigious amount of star formation shows scientists that much of the hot has cooled to the point where new stars can form, without outbursts driven by the black hole providing a heating source that prevents most of this cooling. This addresses an ongoing question of how much black holes stymie or support the birth of stars in their environments.
Relaxed clusters like SPT2215 are one of the signposts that have been used to measure the expansion of the universe. Adding distant objects like this to the sample of relaxed clusters allows astronomers to better constrain the acceleration of the cosmic expansion, and the properties of the dark energy that drives it.
Our Solar System: How were Planets Named? We Asked a NASA Expert
How do planets get their names? With the exception of Earth, the planets in our solar system were named after Greek or Roman gods. Today, the job of naming things in space falls to the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the internationally recognized authority for naming celestial bodies and their surface features. NASA scientist Dr. Henry Throop explains more.
Video Credit: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
To Space (and Back) | High Above Down Under | NASA Goddard
Episode 5: Follow two NASA rocket teams as they launch from Australia to study our nearest stellar neighbors—Alpha Centauri A & B—on a quest to understand how stars make the planets around them suitable for life.
In this episode, the moment you have been waiting for. Time to launch some rockets!
NASA’s Juno Spacecraft Flies Past Planet Jupiter & Moon Io
On May 16, 2023, NASA’s Juno spacecraft flew past Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io, and then the gas giant soon after. Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. Slightly larger than Earth’s moon, Io is a world in constant torment. The biggest planet in the solar system is forever pulling at it gravitationally, along with its Galilean siblings—Europa and the biggest moon in the solar system, Ganymede. The result is that Io is continuously stretched and squeezed, actions linked to the creation of the lava seen erupting from its many volcanoes.
This rendering provides a “starship captain” point of view of the flyby, using images from JunoCam. For both targets, Io and Jupiter, raw JunoCam images were reprojected into views similar to the perspective of a consumer camera. The Io flyby and the Jupiter approach movie were rendered separately and composed into a synchronous split-screen video.
Launched on Aug. 5, 2011, Juno embarked on a 5-year journey to Jupiter. Its mission: to probe beneath the planet's dense clouds and answer questions about the origin and evolution of Jupiter, our solar system, and giant planets in general across the cosmos. Juno arrived at the gas giant on July 4, 2016, after a 1.7-billion-mile journey, and settled into a 53-day polar orbit stretching from just above Jupiter’s cloud tops to the outer reaches of the Jovian magnetosphere. Now in its extended mission, NASA’s most distant planetary orbiter continues doing flybys of Jupiter and its moons.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) manages the Juno mission for NASA. The mission's principal investigator is Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. The mission is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, managed at the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the spacecraft.
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