Northrop Grumman Cygnus Cargo Ship Departure | International Space Station
https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/
Image Credit: NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC)
Image Date: July 12, 2024
Friends of NASA (FoN) is an independent non-governmental organization (NGO) dedicated to building international support for peaceful space exploration, commerce, scientific discovery, and STEM education.
Northrop Grumman Cygnus Cargo Ship Departure | International Space Station
https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/
Image Credit: NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC)
Image Date: July 12, 2024
Expedition 71 Crew Photos: July 2024 | International Space Station
Expedition 71 Updates:
https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/
Learn more about the important research being operated on Station:
https://www.nasa.gov/iss-science
For more information about STEM on Station:
https://www.nasa.gov/stemonstation
Science, Technology, Engineering, Math (STEM)
Image Credit: NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC)
Image Dates: July 1-11, 2024
Star Diary: Mars Meets The Pleiades: July 15-21, 2024 | BBC Sky at Night Magazine
Watch Mars as it passes by the Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters, in this week’s night sky, while bright Jupiter shines nearby. Find out how to see the sight for yourself by listening to this week’s episode of Star Diary, July 15 to 21, 2024, the podcast from the makers of BBC Sky at Night Magazine.
Transcript: https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/podcasts/star-diary-15-jul-202
Video Credit: BBC Sky at Night Magazine
Duration: 18 minutes, 40 seconds
The Sun: Abundant Sunspot Activity | NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory
An abundance of sunspot groups are present on the visible solar disk—at least 12 active regions. Sunspots are areas that appear dark on the surface of the Sun. They appear dark because they are cooler than other parts of the Sun’s surface. Solar flares are a sudden explosion of energy caused by tangling, crossing, or reorganizing of magnetic field lines near sunspots. The southern solar hemisphere has the most and largest sunspot complexes at this time, to include the most likely flare sources: Regions 3738, 3743, and 3751. Region 3738 is the most magnetically complex, but growth has slowed and it will rotate out to the western solar limb by Wednesday, July 17, 2024.
R1-R2 (Minor-Moderate) solar flares remain likely between July 15-18, 2024.
To see how such space weather may affect Earth, please visit the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center: https://spaceweather.gov
NOAA is the U.S. government’s official source for space weather forecasts, watches, warnings, and alerts.
NASA works as a research arm of the nation’s space weather effort. NASA observes the Sun and our space environment constantly with a fleet of spacecraft that study everything from the Sun’s activity to the solar atmosphere, and to the particles and magnetic fields in the space surrounding Earth.
Take a Ride on Artemis Astronaut Launchpad Emergency Escape System | NASA
Take a look inside one of the emergency egress baskets at Launch Pad 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the Artemis missions. In the event of an emergency at the pad during the launch countdown, these baskets, similar to gondolas on ski lifts, will take the astronauts and pad personnel safely from the mobile launcher to the base of the pad where emergency transport vehicles will drive them away.
Four astronauts will venture around the Moon in the Orion spacecraft on Artemis II. It will be the first crewed mission on NASA's path to establishing a long-term presence at the Moon for science and exploration through the Artemis campaign.
Check the NASA Artemis II Mission page for updates:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission/artemis-ii/
Video Credit: NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC)
Duration: 49 seconds
Release Date: July 15, 2024
#NASA #ESA #CSA #Space #Moon #ArtemisProgram #ArtemisIIMission #ArtemisII #LaunchPad39B #Astronauts #EscapeSystem #MoonToMars #Science #DeepSpace #SpaceExploration #HumanSpaceflight #KSC #NASAKennedy #Florida #UnitedStates #Canada #Europe #STEM #Education #HD #Video
NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover Spots Unusual Rock in Ancient River Channel
As NASA’s Perseverance rover prepares to ascend to the rim of Jezero Crater, its team is investigating a rock unlike any that they have seen so far on Mars. Deputy project scientist Katie Stack Morgan explains why this rock, found in an ancient channel that funneled water into the crater, could be among the oldest that Perseverance has investigated—or the youngest.
Plus, learn how the rover is equipped to determine when rocks are formed, and get a preview of where it will journey next.
NASA’s Perseverance rover landed on Mars in 2021 with a key objective to collect and cache samples that may contain signs of ancient microbial life.
For more information on Perseverance, visit: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-2020-perseverance/
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
Duration: 2 minutes
Release Date: July 15, 2024
#NASA #Space #Astronomy #Science #Mars #RedPlanet #Planet #Astrobiology #Geology #PerseveranceRover #Mars2020 #JezeroCrater #Robotics #SpaceTechnology #SpaceEngineering #JPL #Caltech #ASU #MSSS #UnitedStates #STEM #Education #HD #Video
Artemis II Moon Mission Progress at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center
Teams at NASA's Kennedy Space Center have been progressing toward the launch of four astronauts around the Moon on the Artemis II mission. Engineers and technicians with Exploration Ground Systems (EGS) are ensuring they are ready to build, launch and recover the rocket and spacecraft for the mission.
Four astronauts will venture around the Moon in the Orion spacecraft on Artemis II. It will be the first crewed mission on NASA's path to establishing a long-term presence at the Moon for science and exploration through the Artemis campaign.
Video Credit: NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC)
Duration: 3 minutes, 13 seconds
#NASA #ESA #CSA #Space #Moon #ArtemisProgram #ArtemisIIMission #ArtemisII #OrionSpacecraft #DeepSpace #Astronauts #VictorGlover #ChristinaKoch #JeremyHansen #ReidWiseman #MoonToMars #Science #SpaceExploration #HumanSpaceflight #KSC #NASAKennedy #Florida #UnitedStates #Canada #Europe #STEM #Education #HD #Video
A Surprising Ring 10 Billion Light Years Away: Galaxy PJ0116-24 | ESO
Previous studies suggested that such extreme galaxies must result from galactic mergers. These galactic collisions are thought to create dense gas regions where rapid star formation is triggered. However, isolated galaxies can also become HyLIRGs via internal processes alone, if star-forming gas is rapidly funneled towards the galaxy’s center.
In a new paper led by Daizhong Liu of the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, observations from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) were combined to study the motion of gas within PJ0116-24. ALMA traces cold gas, seen here in blue, whereas the VLT, with its new Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS), traces warm gas, shown in red. Thanks to these detailed observations, the team discovered that the gas in this extreme galaxy was rotating in an organized way, rather than in the chaotic way expected after a galactic collision––a surprising result! This shows convincingly that mergers are not always needed for a galaxy to become a HyLIRG.
PJ0116-24 is so far away that its light took about 10 billion years to reach us. Luckily, a foreground galaxy (not shown here) acted as a gravitational lens, bending and magnifying the light of PJ0116-24 behind it into the Einstein ring seen here. This precise cosmic alignment allows astronomers to zoom in on very distant objects and see them in a level of detail that would otherwise be very hard to achieve.
Learn more:
https://www.mpe.mpg.de/8025063/news20240715
Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/ESO/D. Liu et al.
Release Date: July 15, 2024
#NASA #ESO #Space #Astronomy #Science #Galaxies #Galaxy #PJ011624 #HyLIRG #Constellation #Cetus #ALMA #RadioTelescope #VLT #ParanalObservatory #Cosmos #Universe #Chile #MPE #Germany #Deutschland #Europe #STEM #Education
Sun Releases Strong X1.2 Class Solar Flare | NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory
The Sun, shown in teal against a black back ground. The Sun is a mix of darker, almost black areas and bright teal regions. On the right is an extremely bright flash of white.
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this image of a solar flare—seen as the bright flash on the right—on July 13, 2024. The image shows a subset of extreme ultraviolet light that highlights the extremely hot material in flares and which is colorized in teal. Solar flares are powerful bursts of energy. Flares and solar eruptions can impact radio communications, electric power grids, navigation signals, and pose risks to spacecraft and astronauts.
This flare is classified as an X1.2 class flare. X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength.
To see how such space weather may affect Earth, please visit the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center: https://spaceweather.gov
NOAA is the U.S. government’s official source for space weather forecasts, watches, warnings, and alerts.
NASA works as a research arm of the nation’s space weather effort. NASA observes the Sun and our space environment constantly with a fleet of spacecraft that study everything from the Sun’s activity to the solar atmosphere, and to the particles and magnetic fields in the space surrounding Earth.
Dwarf Irregular Galaxy NGC 5238 in Canes Venatici | Hubble
NGC 5238 is theorized to have recently—here meaning no more than a billion years ago—had a close encounter with another galaxy. The evidence for this is the tidal distortions of NGC 5238’s shape, the kind produced by two galaxies pulling on each other as they interact. There is no nearby galaxy that could have caused this disturbance, so the hypothesis is that the culprit is a smaller satellite galaxy that was devoured by NGC 5238. Traces of the erstwhile galaxy might be found by closely examining the population of stars in NGC 5238, a task for which the Hubble Space Telescope is an astronomer’s best tool. Two tell-tale signs would be groups of stars with properties that look out of place compared to most of the galaxy’s other stars, indicating that they were originally formed in a separate galaxy, or stars that look to have all formed abruptly at around the same time. This would occur during a galactic merger. The data used to make this image will be put to use in testing these predictions.
Despite their small size and unremarkable appearance, it is not unusual for dwarf galaxies like NGC 5238 to drive our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution. One main theory of galaxy evolution is that galaxies formed ‘bottom-up’ in a hierarchical fashion: star clusters and small galaxies were the first to form out of gas and dark matter, and they gradually were assembled by gravity into galaxy clusters and superclusters, explaining the shape of the very largest structures in the Universe today. A dwarf irregular galaxy like NGC 5238 merging with an even smaller companion is just the type of event that might have begun this process of galaxy assembly in the early Universe. So, it turns out that this tiny galaxy may serve as a testbed for the most fundamental predictions in astrophysics!
Image Description: A dwarf irregular galaxy. It appears as a cloud of bluish gas, filled with point-like stars that also spread beyond the edge of the gas. A few glowing red clouds sit near its center. Many other objects can be seen around it: distant galaxies in the background, four-pointed stars in the foreground, and star clusters that are part of the galaxy—shining spots surrounded by more tiny stars.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, F. Annibali
Release Date: July 15, 2024
#NASA #Hubble #Astronomy #Space #Science #Galaxies #Galaxy #NGC5238 #GalacticMergers #InteractingGalaxies #Stars #GlobularClusters #CanesVenatici #Constellation #Cosmos #Universe #HST #SpaceTelescope #ESA #Europe #GSFC #STScI #UnitedStates #STEM #Education
Spiral Galaxy NGC 5643 in Lupus | Hubble
NGC 5643 is about 60 million light-years away from Earth. It has been the host of a recent supernova event (not visible in this latest image). This supernova (2017cbv) involves a white dwarf star stealing so much mass from a companion star that it becomes unstable and explodes. The explosion releases significant amounts of energy and lights up that part of the galaxy.
The observation was proposed by Adam Riess. He was awarded a Nobel Laureate in physics 2011 for his contributions to the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe, alongside Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Riess et al.
Acknowledgement: Mahdi Zamani
Release Date: Sept. 28, 2020
#NASA #Hubble #Astronomy #Space #Science #Galaxies #Galaxy #NGC5643 #Spiral #Supernova #Supernova2017cbv #Lupus #Constellation #Cosmos #Universe #HST #SpaceTelescope #ESA #Europe #GSFC #STScI #UnitedStates #STEM #Education
Galaxy Cluster MACS J0416 | NASA Chandra, Hubble & Webb Space Telescopes
Galaxy clusters are the largest objects in the universe held together by gravity, and ones like this can contain hundreds or even thousands of individual galaxies all immersed in massive amounts of superheated gas that Chandra can detect. In this view, Chandra’s X-rays in purple show this reservoir of hot gas while Hubble and Webb pick up the individual galaxies in red, green, and blue. The long thin lines are caused by matter in the cluster distorting the light from galaxies behind MACS J0416 in a process known as gravitational lensing.
Image Description: Here, the blackness of space is packed with glowing dots and tiny shapes, in whites, purples, oranges, golds, and reds, each a distinct galaxy. Upon close inspection (and with a great deal of zooming in) spiraling arms of the seemingly tiny galaxies can be revealed in this highly detailed image. Gently arched across the middle of the frame is a soft band of purple—a reservoir of superheated gas detected by Chandra.
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/G. Ogrean et al.; Optical/Infrared: (Hubble) NASA/ESA/STScI; IR: (JWST) NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/Jose M. Diego (IFCA), Jordan C. J. D'Silva (UWA), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI), Jake Summers (ASU), Rogier Windhorst (ASU), Haojing Yan (University of Missouri)
Release Date: July 11, 2024
#NASA #Space #Astronomy #Science #Galaxies #GalaxyClusters #MACSJ0416 #GravitationalLensing #Eridanus #Constellation #Cosmos #Universe #NASAChandra #ChandraObservatory #Xray #MSFC #JWST #Infrared #HST #SpaceTelescopes #GSFC #STScI #UnitedStates #ESA #CSA #STEM #Education
Galaxy NGC 3627 in Leo | NASA Chandra, Hubble & Webb Space Telescopes
Like the Milky Way, NGC 3627 is a spiral galaxy that we see at a slight angle. NGC 3627 is known as a “barred” spiral galaxy because of the rectangular shape of its central region. From our vantage point, we can also see two distinct spiral arms that appear as arcs. X-rays from Chandra in purple show evidence for a supermassive black hole in its center as well as other dense objects like neutron stars and black holes pulling in matter. Meanwhile Webb finds the dust, gas, and stars throughout the galaxy in red, green, and blue. This image also contains optical data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in red, green, and blue.
Image Description: A hazy image of a spiral galaxy known as NGC 3627. Here, the galaxy appears pitched at an oblique angle, tilted from our upper left down to our lower right. Much of its face is angled toward us, making its spiral arms, composed of red and purple dots, easily identifiable. Several bright white dots ringed with neon purple speckle the galaxy. At the galaxy’s core, where the spiral arms converge, a large white and purple glow identified by Chandra provides evidence of a supermassive black hole.
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: NASA/ESO/STScI, ESO/WFI; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/JWST
Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/J. Major
Release Date: July 11, 2024
#NASA #Space #Astronomy #Science #Galaxies #Galaxy #NGC3627 #M66 #BlackHoles #NeutronStars #Leo #Constellation #Cosmos #Universe #NASAChandra #ChandraObservatory #Xray #MSFC #JWST #Infrared #HST #SpaceTelescopes #GSFC #STScI #UnitedStates #ESA #CSA #STEM #Education
Orion Nebula | NASA Chandra & Webb Space Telescopes
Image Description: This is a peek into the heart of the Orion Nebula. It blankets the entire image. Here, the young star nursery resembles a dense, stringy, dusty rose cloud, peppered with thousands of glowing golden, white, and blue stars. Layers of cloud around the edges of the image, and a concentration of bright stars at its distant core, help convey the depth of the nebula.
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/E. Feigelson; IR: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI
Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare and J. Major
Release Date: July 11, 2024
#NASA #Space #Astronomy #Science #Nebulae #Stars #OrionNebula #M42 #Orion #Constellation #Cosmos #Universe #NASAChandra #ChandraObservatory #Xray #MSFC #JWST #Infrared #SpaceTelescopes #GSFC #STScI #UnitedStates #ESA #CSA #STEM #Education
Rho Ophiuchi Cloud Complex | NASA Chandra & Webb Space Telescopes
Image Description: The murky green and gold cloud resembles a ghostly head in profile, swooping down from the upper left, trailing tendrils of hair. Cutting across the bottom edge and lower righthand corner of the image is a long, narrow, brick red cloud which resembles the ember of a stick pulled from a fire. Several large white stars dot the image. Many are surrounded by glowing neon purple rings, and gleam with diffraction spikes.
Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/MIT/C. Canizares; IR: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/K. Pontoppidan
Image Processing: NASA/ESA/STScI/Alyssa Pagan, NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare and J. Major
Release Date: July 11, 2024
#NASA #Space #Astronomy #Science #Nebulae #Stars #StellarNurseries #RhoOphiuchi #CloudComplex #Ophiuchus #Constellation #Cosmos #Universe #NASAChandra #ChandraObservatory #Xray #MSFC #JWST #Infrared #SpaceTelescopes #GSFC #STScI #UnitedStates #ESA #CSA #STEM #Education
Asteroid Photobombs Hubble Snapshot of Galaxy UGC 12158
The asteroid appears as a curved trail as a result of parallax: Hubble is not stationary, but orbiting Earth, and this gives the illusion that the faint asteroid is swimming along a curved trajectory. The uncharted asteroid is inside the asteroid belt in our Solar System, and hence is 10 trillion times closer to Hubble than the background galaxy.
Rather than being a nuisance, this type of data is useful to astronomers for doing a census of the asteroid population in our Solar System.
Image Description: This is a Hubble Space Telescope image of the barred spiral galaxy UGC 12158. The majestic galaxy has a pinwheel shape made up of bright blue stars wound around a yellow-white hub of central stars. The hub has a slash of stars across it, called a bar. The galaxy is tilted face-on to our view from Earth. A slightly S-shaped white line across the top is the Hubble image of an asteroid streaking across Hubble’s view. It looks dashed because the image is a combination of several exposures of the asteroid flying by like a race car.
Credit: NASA, ESA, P. G. Martín (Autonomous University of Madrid), J. DePasquale (STScI).
Acknowledgment: A. Filippenko (University of California, Berkeley)
Release Date: April 18, 2024
#NASA #Hubble #Astronomy #Space #Science #Galaxies #Galaxy #UGC12158 #Barred #Supernova #SN2004ef #Pegasus #Constellation #Cosmos #Universe #HST #SpaceTelescope #ESA #Europe #GSFC #STScI #UnitedStates #STEM #Education