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NASA's Space to Ground: Tracking a Trend | Week of Aug.18, 2023
NASA's Space to Ground is your weekly update on what's happening aboard the International Space Station (ISS). The ISS Progress 83 cargo craft is due to end it six-month stay at the orbital lab on Sunday, Aug. 20, 2023, when it undocks from the Zvezda service module’s aft port at 7:48 p.m. EDT. It will be replaced on Thursday Aug. 24, when the ISS Progress 85 cargo craft docks to the same port on Zvezda two days after its launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Just four hours after the Progress 85 arrives, four crew members aboard the SpaceX Dragon crew spacecraft will launch from the Kennedy Space Center to the space station. The SpaceX Crew-7 mission will dock to the Harmony module’s space-facing port just one day after its liftoff and the four crew mates will enter the orbiting lab to begin a six-month space research mission.
Station Commander: Sergey Prokopyev of Roscosmos (Russia)
Roscosmos (Russia): Flight Engineers Dmitri Petelin & Andrey Fedyaev
Flight Engineer Sultan Alneyadi of the United Arab Emirates (UAE)
NASA: Flight Engineers Frank Rubio, Stephen Bowen, Warren Hoburg
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.
Learn more about the important research being operated on Station:
Storm Clouds above Australia's Gulf of Carpentaria | International Space Station
Storm clouds are pictured in this oblique view from the International Space Station as it orbited 261 miles above Australia's Gulf of Carpentaria. The Gulf of Carpentaria is a sea off the northern coast of Australia. It is enclosed on three sides by northern Australia and bounded on the north by the eastern Arafura Sea, which separates Australia and New Guinea.
Station Commander: Sergey Prokopyev of Roscosmos (Russia)
Roscosmos (Russia): Flight Engineers Dmitri Petelin & Andrey Fedyaev
Flight Engineer Sultan Alneyadi of the United Arab Emirates (UAE)
NASA: Flight Engineers Frank Rubio, Stephen Bowen, Warren Hoburg
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.
Learn more about the important research being operated on Station:
The Boogeyman Nebula: LDN 1622 in Orion | Schulman Telescope
To some, this dark shape looks like a mythical boogeyman—a mythical creature used by adults to frighten children into good behavior. Scientifically, Lynds' Dark Nebula (LDN) 1622 appears against a faint background of glowing hydrogen gas only visible in long telescopic exposures of the region. LDN 1622 lies near the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy, close in the sky to Barnard's Loop, a large cloud surrounding the rich complex of emission nebulae found in the Belt and Sword of Orion.
LDN 1622 is a dark nebula, so called because these dense interstellar clouds of gas and dust blot out light from background objects, appearing as ink-dark clouds against a backdrop of stars. This enigmatic cosmic cloud is 1,300 light-years from Earth in the nearby Orion complex, a star-forming region thronging with young stars and other dark nebulae.
Technical Details
Optics: Schulman 32-inch RCOS Telescope
Camera: SBIG STX16803
Image Credit & Copyright: Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona
Gravitational Waves: Ripples in Space-Time | Hubble Science | NASA Goddard
Gravitational waves are invisible ripples in the fabric of space-time. They are caused by some of the most violent and energetic events in the universe. These include colliding black holes, collapsing stellar cores, merging neutron stars or white dwarf stars, the wobble of neutron stars that are not perfect spheres and possibly even the remnants of gravitational radiation created by the birth of the universe.
In this video, Dr. Padi Boyd explains gravitational waves and how important the Hubble Space Telescope is to exploring the mysteries of the universe.
Credit: ESA/Hubble (M. Kornmesser & L. L. Christensen), A. Fujii, Robert Gendler, Digitized Sky Survey 2, Panther Observatory, Steve Cannistra, Michael Pierce, Robert Berrington (Indiana University), Nigel Sharp, Mark Hanna (NOAO)/WIYN/NSF.
The Artemis II astronauts check out their ride to the Moon, practicing post-splashdown recovery operations for Artemis II, and the Webb Space Telescope checks out a record-breaking star . . . a few of the stories to tell you about—This Week at NASA!
The Artemis II crew—NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Hammock Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen—visited the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida on Aug. 8, 2023. The crew module is undergoing acoustic testing ahead of integration with the European Service Module. Artemis II is the first crewed mission on NASA’s path to establishing a long-term lunar presence for science and exploration under Artemis.
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.
Artemis II will launch no earlier than December 2024.
HD 45166: The Most Magnetic Massive Star Found | Artist’s Animation | ESO
This video shows an artist’s animation of HD 45166, a massive star recently discovered to have a powerful magnetic field of 43,000 gauss, the strongest magnetic field ever found in a massive star. Intense winds of particles blowing away from the star are trapped by this magnetic field, enshrouding the star in a gaseous shell as illustrated here.
This finding provides clues to the origin of magnetars, compact dead stars laced with magnetic fields at least a billion times stronger than the one in HD 45166. Astronomers believe that this star will end its life as a magnetar. As it collapses under its own gravity, its magnetic field will strengthen, and the star will eventually become a very compact core with a magnetic field of around 100 trillion gauss—the most powerful type of magnet in the Universe.
HD 45166 is part of a binary system. In the background, we get a glimpse of HD 45166’s companion, a normal blue star that has been found to orbit at a far larger distance than previously reported.
New Type of Massive Magnetic Helium Stars Gives Clues to Magnetars’ Origins | ESO
ESOcast 264 Light: Using multiple telescopes around the world, including European Southern Observatory (ESO) facilities, researchers have uncovered a living star that is likely to become a magnetar, an ultra-magnetic dead star that is a variant of neutron stars. This video summarizes the discovery. Magnetars are the strongest magnets in the Universe. These super-dense dead stars with ultra-strong magnetic fields can be found all over our galaxy but astronomers do not know exactly how they form. This finding marks the discovery of a new type of astronomical object—massive magnetic helium stars—and sheds light on the origin of magnetars.
Despite having been observed for over 100 years, the enigmatic nature of the star HD 45166 could not be easily explained by conventional models, and little was known about it beyond the fact that it is one of a pair of stars, is rich in helium and is a few times more massive than our Sun. HD 45166 is located about 3,000 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros (the Unicorn). This star was discovered to have an incredibly strong magnetic field, of 43,000 gauss, making HD 45166 the most magnetic massive helium star found to date.
In a few million years, HD 45166 will explode as a very bright, but not particularly energetic, supernova. During this explosion, its core will contract, trapping and concentrating the star’s already daunting magnetic field lines. The result will be a neutron star with a magnetic field of around 100 trillion gauss—the most powerful type of magnet in the Universe.
Neutron stars, the compact remains of a massive star following a supernova explosion, are the densest matter in the Universe. Some neutron stars, known as magnetars, also claim the record for the strongest magnetic fields of any object. How magnetars, which are a mere 15 kilometers across, form and produce such colossal magnetic fields remains a mystery.
Video & Caption Credits: ESO/NOIRLab
Directed by: Angelos Tsaousis and Martin Wallner
Editing: Angelos Tsaousis
Web and technical support: Gurvan Bazin and Raquel Yumi Shida
Written by: Claudia Sciarma and Tom Howarth
Footage and photos: ESO / L. Calçada, Angelos Tsaousis, B. Tafreshi, P. Horálek, Zdeněk Bardon, José Francisco Salgado
Scientific consultant: Paola Amico, Mariya Lyubenova
Russia's Luna-25 South Pole Lander: First Close-up Moon Image
[No Audio] Russia's Luna-25 lunar lander mission captured an image of the Zeeman crater located on the Moon's far side, near its south pole, on August 17, 2023. Zeeman crater is not directly visible from the Earth. Russia launched an uncrewed spacecraft, called Luna-25, Friday, Aug. 11, 2023, designed to land on the south pole of the Moon—the country's first robotic lunar mission since 1976. Russia seeks to become the first nation to make a soft landing on the Moon’s icy south pole.
Luna-25 will attempt a soft landing on the lunar surface, north of the Boguslawsky crater, on Aug. 21, 2023, according to Roscosmos. Boguslawsky is a lunar impact crater that is located near the Moon's southern lunar limb.
This timetable puts Russia in a race with India, which launched a similar mission—the Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander—last month and is aiming to soft-land on the Moon's south pole by Aug. 23. “We hope to be first,” Roscosmos chief Yuri Borisov reportedly said at Luna-25's launch.
Borisov, director general of Roscosmos, hailed the Aug. 21 launch as a “new page” for Russian space exploration. “All the results of the research will be transferred to Earth,” he said on state television. “We are interested in the presence of water, as well as many other experiments related to the study of the soil, the site.” He noted that the mission is bound to face some “obstacles” along the way.
Planet Neptune’s Disappearing Clouds Linked to the Solar Cycle | Hubble
Recent observations from the Hubble Space Telescope show that Neptune's clouds are almost completely disappearing! Astronomers report that their continual monitoring of Neptune’s weather uncovered a link between its shifting cloud abundance and the 11-year solar cycle, where the Sun’s activity waxes and wanes under the driving force of its entangled magnetic field.
At present, the cloud coverage seen on Neptune is extremely low, with the exception of some clouds hovering over the giant planet’s south pole. A team of astronomers discovered that the abundance of clouds normally seen at the icy giant’s mid-latitudes started to fade in 2019.
Planet Neptune's Cloud Cover over Three Decades: Linked to Solar Cycle | Hubble
This sequence of Hubble Space Telescope images chronicles the waxing and waning of the amount of cloud cover on Neptune. This long set of observations shows that the number of clouds grows increasingly following a peak in the solar cycle—where the Sun's level of activity rhythmically rises and falls over an 11-year period. The chemical changes are caused by photochemistry, which happens high in Neptune's upper atmosphere and takes time to form clouds.
The images reveal an intriguing pattern between seasonal changes in Neptune’s cloud cover and the solar cycle—the period when the Sun's magnetic field flips every 11 years as it becomes more tangled like a ball of yarn. This is evident in the increasing number of sunspots and increasing solar flare activity. As the cycle progresses, the Sun’s tempestuous behavior builds to a maximum, until the magnetic field beaks down and reverses polarity. Then the Sun settles back down to a minimum, only to start another cycle.
When it is stormy weather on the Sun, more intense ultraviolet (UV) radiation floods the solar system. The team found that two years after the solar cycle's peak, an increasing number of clouds appear on Neptune. The team further found a positive correlation between the number of clouds and the ice giant's brightness from the sunlight reflecting off it.
The link between Neptune and solar activity is surprising to planetary scientists because Neptune is our solar system's farthest major planet and receives sunlight with about 0.1% of the intensity Earth receives. Yet Neptune's global cloudy weather seems to be driven by solar activity, and not the planet's four seasons, which each last approximately 40 years.
In 1989, NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft provided the first close-up images of linear, bright clouds, reminiscent of cirrus clouds on Earth, seen high in Neptune's atmosphere. They form above most of the methane in Neptune's atmosphere and reflect all colors of sunlight, which makes them white. Hubble picks up where the brief Voyager flyby left off by continually keeping an eye on the planet yearly.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, in Washington, D.C.
Credits: NASA, European Space Agency, Erandi Chavez (UC Berkeley), Imke de Pater (UC Berkeley)
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-7 are preparing to start their mission to the International Space Station. NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli will join European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Andreas Mogensen of Denmark, Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov of Russia and astronaut Satoshi Furukawa from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is targeted to launch Crew-7 no earlier than 3:49 a.m. EDT on Friday, Aug. 25, 2023, from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli will be the spacecraft commander of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-7 —the agency’s seventh rotational mission to the International Space Station. This will be the first spaceflight for Moghbeli, who became a NASA astronaut in 2017.
Mogensen will be the spacecraft pilot of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-7 mission—the first non-US astronaut assigned in this capacity.
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.
Credit: Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX)
A Giant in Moonlight: The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) under Construction
This image shows the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) construction site in the Atacama desert of Chile in South America, kissed by the white moonlight that fills the air. Although the Moon itself is not in the frame, you can feel its presence nearby. The night sky is a deep blue, becoming slightly whiter as it meets the brown horizon of the desert. Dominating the center of the image is the giant ELT structure under construction, with its circular concrete base at the bottom and its magnificent steel-framed dome on top. The criss-cross steel frame now has two complete arches at the top. On the right and left of the ELT are two cranes leaning in towards the telescope.
It is now close to 80 meters high—the mammoth steel structure of the European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) dome is taking shape in this image, taken on August 2, 2023, under the light of the full Moon. Right now, engineers and construction workers are assembling the structure of the telescope dome in the Chilean Atacama Desert, with progress visible almost every day. When completed, the ELT will be the world’s biggest eye on the sky for visible and infrared observations.
Overall, the ELT project is now more than 50 percent complete. The dome structure visible here will house a pioneering five-mirror optical design, which includes a giant main mirror (M1), 39 meters wide and made up of 798 hexagonal segments. The telescope mirrors and other components are being built by companies in Europe, where work is progressing well too. All of the other systems needed to complete the ELT, including the control system and the equipment needed to assemble and test the telescope, are also coming along nicely.
When finished, the dome will weigh in at 6100 tonnes, and it will need a mind-boggling 30 million bolts to be held together. This huge structure will shelter the telescope during observations, protecting it from the elements. The entire behemoth will rotate on 36 stationary trolleys, allowing astronomers to observe the southern sky from just about any direction they fancy.
The current largest optical telescopes have diameters of up to ten meters, and the ELT's diameter will thus be four times greater. This diameter was chosen because it is the minimum diameter needed to achieve some of the driving science cases. For example, the ELT will be able to image rocky exoplanets and to characterize their atmospheres, while the existing ESO Very Large Telecope (VLT) can only indirectly detect such Earth-like planets. Moreover, the ELT will be able to directly measure the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe. Adaptive optics systems are fully incorporated into the design of the telescope to compensate for the fuzziness in the stellar images introduced by atmospheric turbulence. The ELT will have more than 5,000 actuators that can change the shape of its mirrors a thousand times per second.
"It’s full of stars!" | Globular Star Cluster NGC 6723 in Sagittarius | ESO
A dark background is dotted with countless white and yellow stars in this image, almost like snow falling on a winter’s night. At the center, the density of these dots increases, forming a circular bright white region where the background is almost completely obscured. This dense region is the globular cluster.
This image taken with the European Southern Observatory’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope (VISTA) at Paranal Observatory in Chile—might look like a scene from a snowy winter's night, but it’s not. It is an infrared image of NGC 6723, a globular cluster located about 28,000 light years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius. Globular clusters are spherical-shaped groups of stars, tightly bound together by gravity. Their name is derived from the Latin word globulus, meaning small sphere—somewhat misleading given that NGC 6723, as most globular clusters, contains hundred of thousands to millions of stars.
So far, astronomers have found more than 150 globular clusters in our galaxy, the Milky Way, with most of them estimated to be at least 10 billion years old and hosting some of the oldest stars in the galaxy.
Globular clusters were key to pinpointing our own location within the Milky Way in the early 20th century. American astronomer Harlow Shapley measured the distances to several globular clusters, and noticed that they were arranged in a roughly spherical distribution, but the Sun was not at its center. He correctly inferred that the heart of the Milky Way lays at the center of this distribution of globular clusters, placing the Sun in the suburbs of the galaxy.
Credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO)/S. Meingast et al.
NASA's Space to Ground is your weekly update on what's happening aboard the International Space Station. Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft docking at the International Space Station was completed on Friday, August 4, 2023. Cygnus, carrying over 8,200 pounds of cargo and science experiments, launched atop the company’s Antares rocket at 8:31 p.m. EDT Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2023, from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. At 5:52 a.m., Aug. 4, NASA astronaut Woody Hoburg, along with NASA astronaut Frank Rubio as backup, captured Cygnus using the station’s Canadarm2 robotic arm.
Station Commander: Sergey Prokopyev of Roscosmos (Russia)
Roscosmos (Russia): Flight Engineers Dmitri Petelin & Andrey Fedyaev
Flight Engineer Sultan Alneyadi of the United Arab Emirates (UAE)
NASA: Flight Engineers Frank Rubio, Stephen Bowen, Warren Hoburg
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.
Learn more about the important research being operated on Station:
Do Robots Help Humans in Space? We Asked a NASA Technologist
When it comes to space, humans and robots go way back. We rely heavily on our mechanical friends to perform tasks that are too dangerous, difficult, or out of reach for us humans. We are even working on a new generation of robots that will help us explore in advanced and novel ways.
Learn more about the CADRE—Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration—project and how this new network of mini rovers could enable future self-guided robotic exploration of the Moon, Mars, and beyond:
Mars: Slipping & Sliding in Echus Chaos | NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
Echus Chaos is a region of low hills located between Lunae Planum (to the right of this image) and Echus Palus (to the left of this image). This chaos terrain may have formed as the rocks that make up Lunae Planum slowly slid downhill into Echus Palus.
As these rocks slid downhill, they broke up into large pieces that formed the hills that we see today. What caused this landslide is not well known, but it could have been due to large floods of water moving through Echus Palus, causing the edge of Lunae Planum to become soaked and fall apart. Ground shaking from movement along nearby faults or meteorite impacts may have also helped to make the edge of Lunae Planum unstable and collapse.
Black and white images are less than 5 km across; enhanced color is less than 1 km.
This image was taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) instrument.
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is a spacecraft designed to study the geology and climate of Mars, to provide reconnaissance of future landing sites, and to relay data from surface missions back to Earth. It was launched on August 12, 2005, and reached Mars on March 10, 2006.
Image Date: May 18, 2012
Latitude (centered): 8.838°
Longitude (East): 285.140°
Spacecraft altitude: 271.3 km (168.6 miles)
The University of Arizona, Tucson, operates the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) instrument, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colorado.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.
“For 17 years, MRO has been revealing Mars to us as no one had seen it before,” said the mission’s project scientist, Rich Zurek of JPL.
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