Solar System: Things To Know This Week

Say hello to the Helix Nebula 👋

In 2001 and 2002, our Hubble Space Telescope looked at the Helix Nebula and it looked right back! This planetary nebula is right in our cosmic neighborhood, only about 650 light-years away. Gigantic for this type of cosmic object, the Helix Nebula stretches across 2 to 3 light-years.

With no actual connection to planets, planetary nebulas like this one are produced when a medium-mass star dies and sloughs off its outer layers. These gaseous layers are expelled into space at astonishing speeds where they light up like fireworks. The Helix Nebula is one of the closest planetary nebulas to Earth, giving scientists an up-close view of its strange affairs.

Through Hubble’s observations, scientists have learned that the Helix Nebula isn’t doughnut-shaped as it appears. Instead it consists of two disks that are nearly perpendicular to each other — the nebula looks like an eye and bulges out like one too!

Hubble has also imaged comet-like tendrils that form a pattern around the central star like the spokes on a wagon wheel, likely resulting from a collision between gases. The dying star spews hot gas from its surface, which crashes into the cooler gas that it ejected 10,000 years before. Eventually the knots will dissipate into the cold blackness of interstellar space.

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Save the Date: 2024 Total Solar Eclipse

On April 8, 2024, a total solar eclipse will travel through Mexico, cross the United States from Texas to Maine, and exit North America along Canada’s Atlantic coast. A total solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between the Sun and the Earth, completely blocking the face of the Sun. The sky will darken as if it were dawn or dusk.

Weather permitting, people throughout most of North and Central America, including all of the contiguous United States, will be able to view at least a partial solar eclipse. A partial solar eclipse is when the Moon only covers part of the Sun. People in Hawaii and parts of Alaska will also experience a partial solar eclipse. Click here to learn more about when and where the solar eclipse will be visible: go.nasa.gov/Eclipse2024Map

Not in the path of the eclipse? Join us online to watch the eclipse with NASA. Set a reminder to watch live: https://go.nasa.gov/3V2CQML

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Solar System: Things to Know This Week

Our solar system is huge, let us break it down for you. Here are a few things to know this week:

1. Up at Jupiter, It’s Down to Business

Ever since our Juno mission entered Jupiter's orbit on July 4, engineers and scientists have been busy getting their newly arrived spacecraft ready for operations. Juno's science instruments had been turned off in the days leading up to Jupiter orbit insertion. As planned, the spacecraft powered up five instruments on July 6, and the remaining instruments should follow before the end of the month. The Juno team has also scheduled a short trajectory correction maneuver on July 13 to refine the orbit.

2. The Shadows Know

Scientists with our Dawn mission have identified permanently shadowed regions on the dwarf planet Ceres. Most of these areas likely have been cold enough to trap water ice for a billion years, suggesting that ice deposits could exist there now (as they do on the planet Mercury). Dawn is looking into it.

3. Frosts of Summer

Some dusty parts of Mars get as cold at night year-round as the planet's poles do in winter, even in regions near the equator in summer, according to new findings based on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter observations. The culprit may be Mars' ever-present dust.

4. Can You Hear Me Now?

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is designed to sample an asteroid and return that sample to Earth. After launch in Sept., the mission's success will depend greatly on its communications systems with Earth to relay everything from its health and status to scientific findings from the asteroid Bennu. That's why engineers from our Deep Space Network recently spent a couple of weeks performing detailed tests of the various communications systems aboard OSIRIS-REx.

5. Cometary Close-ups

The Rosetta spacecraft has taken thousands of photographs of Comet 67/P. The European Space Agency (ESA) is now regularly releasing the highest-resolution images. The word "stunning" is used a lot when referring to pictures from space—and these ones truly are. See the latest HERE.

Want to learn more? Read our full list of the 10 things to know this week about the solar system HERE.

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uhmm, can you tell me what exactly a black hole is? or what iy does? thanks, just really confused and curious on how it actually works.

Planes, Trains and Barges: How We’re Moving Our Artemis 1 Rocket to the Launchpad

Our Space Launch System rocket is on the move this summer — literally. With the help of big and small businesses in all 50 states, various pieces of hardware are making their way to Louisiana for manufacturing, to Alabama for testing, and to Florida for final assembly. All of that work brings us closer to the launch of Artemis 1, SLS and Orion’s first mission to the Moon.

By land and by sea and everywhere in between, here’s why our powerful SLS rocket is truly America’s rocket:

Rollin’ on the River

The SLS rocket will feature the largest core stage we have ever built before. It’s so large, in fact, that we had to modify and refurbish our barge Pegasus to accommodate the massive load. Pegasus was originally designed to transport the giant external tanks of the space shuttles on the 900-mile journey from our rocket factory, Michoud Assembly Facility, in New Orleans to Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Now, our barge ferries test articles from Michoud along the river to Huntsville, Alabama, for testing at Marshall Space Flight Center. Just a week ago, the last of four structural test articles — the liquid oxygen tank — was loaded onto Pegasus to be delivered at Marshall for testing. Once testing is completed and the flight hardware is cleared for launch, Pegasus will again go to work — this time transporting the flight hardware along the Gulf Coast from New Orleans to Cape Canaveral.

Chuggin’ along

The massive, five-segment solid rocket boosters each weigh 1.6 million pounds. That’s the size of four blue whales! The only way to move the components for the powerful boosters on SLS from Promontory, Utah, to the Booster Fabrication Facility and Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy is by railway. That’s why you’ll find railway tracks leading from these assembly buildings and facilities to and from the launch pad, too. Altogether, we have about 38-mile industrial short track on Kennedy alone. Using a small fleet of specialized cars and hoppers and existing railways across the US, we can move the large, bulky equipment from the Southwest to Florida’s Space Coast. With all the motor segments complete in January, the last booster motor segment (pictured above) was moved to storage in Utah. Soon, trains will deliver all 10 segments to Kennedy to be stacked with the booster forward and aft skirts and prepared for flight.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no, it’s super Guppy!

A regular passenger airplane doesn’t have the capacity to carry the specialized hardware for SLS and our Orion spacecraft. Equipped with a unique hinged nose that can open more than 200 degrees, our Super Guppy airplane is specially designed to carry the hulking hardware, like the Orion stage adapter, to the Cape. That hinged nose means cargo is actually loaded from the front, not the back, of the airplane. The Orion stage adapter, delivered to Kennedy in 2018, joins to the rocket’s interim cryogenic propulsion stage, which will give our spacecraft the push it needs to go to the Moon on Artemis 1. It fit perfectly inside the Guppy’s cargo compartment, which is 25 feet tall and 25 feet wide and 111 feet long.

All roads lead to Kennedy

In the end, all roads lead to Kennedy, and the star of the transportation show is really the “crawler.” Rolling along at a delicate 1 MPH when it’s loaded with the mobile launcher, our two crawler-transporters are vital in bringing the fully assembled rocket to the launchpad for each Artemis mission. Each the size of a baseball field and powered by locomotive and large power generator engines, one crawler-transporter is able to carry 18 million pounds on the nine-mile journey to the launchpad. As of June 27, 2019, the mobile launcher atop crawler-transporter 2 made a successful final test roll to the launchpad, clearing the transporter and mobile launcher ready to carry SLS and Orion to the launchpad for Artemis 1.

Dream Team

It takes a lot of team work to launch Artemis 1. We are partnering with Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Aerojet Rocketdyne to produce the complex structures of the rocket. Every one of our centers and more than 1,200 companies across the United States support the development of the rocket that will launch Artemis 1 to the Moon and, ultimately, to Mars. From supplying key tools to accelerate the development of the core stage to aiding the transportation of the rocket closer to the launchpad, companies like Futuramic in Michigan and Major Tool & Machine in Indiana, are playing a vital role in returning American astronauts to the Moon. This time, to stay. To stay up to date with the latest SLS progress, click here.

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Photograph of the Apollo 13 Spacecraft Being Returned to the Prime Recovery Ship, USS Iwo Jima, 4/17/1970

Series: Color Photograph Files, 1965 - 2002. Record Group 255: Records of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1903 - 2006. 

Apollo 13 was intended to be the third Apollo mission to land on the Moon. The craft was launched from Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Florida on April 11, 1970. Two days into the flight, damaged wire insulation inside the oxygen tank in the service module ignited, causing an explosion which vented the oxygen tank into space. Without oxygen, the service module became inoperable and the lunar mission quickly turned into a mission to safely return the crew to Earth. The astronauts worked with Mission Control to shut down the command module in order to conserve the remaining oxygen, forcing all three astronauts into the lunar module. The astronauts continued to work with Mission Control to combat one technical failure after another until, on April 17, 1970, the crew landed safely in the South Pacific Ocean.

source: phillyarchives.tumblr.com

Things That Go Bump in the Gamma Rays

Some people watch scary movies because they like being startled. A bad guy jumps out from around a corner! A monster emerges from the shadows! Scientists experience surprises all the time, but they’re usually more excited than scared. Sometimes theories foreshadow new findings — like when there’s a dramatic swell in the movie soundtrack — but often, discoveries are truly unexpected. 

Scientists working with the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope have been jumping to study mysterious bumps in the gamma rays for a decade now. Gamma rays are the highest-energy form of light. Invisible to human eyes, they’re created by some of the most powerful and unusual events and objects in the universe. In celebration of Halloween, here are a few creepy gamma-ray findings from Fermi’s catalog.

Stellar Graveyards

If you were to walk through a cemetery at night, you’d expect to trip over headstones or grave markers. Maybe you’d worry about running into a ghost. If you could explore the stellar gravesite created when a star explodes as a supernova, you’d find a cloud of debris expanding into interstellar space. Some of the chemical elements in that debris, like gold and platinum, go on to create new stars and planets! Fermi found that supernova remnants IC 443 and W44 also accelerate mysterious cosmic rays, high-energy particles moving at nearly the speed of light. As the shockwave of the supernova expands, particles escape its magnetic field and interact with non-cosmic-ray particles to produce gamma rays. 

Ghost Particles

But the sources of cosmic rays aren’t the only particle mysteries Fermi studies. Just this July, Fermi teamed up with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica to discover the first source of neutrinos outside our galactic neighborhood. Neutrinos are particles that weigh almost nothing and rarely interact with anything. Around a trillion of them pass through you every second, ghost-like, without you noticing and then continue on their way. (But don’t worry, like a friendly ghost, they don’t harm you!) Fermi traced the neutrino IceCube detected back to a supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy. By the time it reached Earth, it had traveled for 3.7 billion years at almost the speed of light!

Black Widow Pulsars

Black widows and redbacks are species of spiders with a reputation for devouring their partners. Astronomers have discovered two types of star systems that behave in a similar way. Sometimes when a star explodes as a supernova, it collapses back into a rapidly spinning, incredibly dense star called a pulsar. If there’s a lighter star nearby, it can get stuck in a close orbit with the pulsar, which blasts it with gamma rays, magnetic fields and intense winds of energetic particles. All these combine to blow clouds of material off the low-mass star. Eventually, the pulsar can eat away at its companion entirely.

Dark Matter

What’s scarier than a good unsolved mystery? Dark matter is a little-understood substance that makes up most of the matter in the universe. The stuff that we can see — stars, people, haunted houses, candy — is made up of normal matter. But our surveys of the cosmos tell us there’s not enough normal matter to keep things working the way they do. There must be another type of matter out there holding everything together. One of Fermi’s jobs is to help scientists narrow down the search for dark matter. Last year, researchers noticed that most of the gamma rays coming from the Andromeda galaxy are confined to its center instead of being spread throughout. One possible explanation is that accumulated dark matter at the center of the galaxy is emitting gamma rays!

Fermi has helped us learn a lot about the gamma-ray universe over the last 10 years. Learn more about its accomplishments and the other mysteries it’s working to solve. What other surprises are waiting out among the stars?

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Solar System: 2016 Preview

What do we have planned for 2016? A return to the king of planets. A survey of mysterious Ceres. More postcards from Pluto. Anyone who follows solar system exploration in 2016 is in for quite a ride. Last year was one for the record books – and now here are 10 things to look forward to in the new year. See also: what we have planned agency wide for 2016.

Juno Arrives at Jupiter

July 4, 2016 is arrival day for the Juno mission, the first sent expressly to study the largest planet in the solar system since our Galileo mission in the 1990s. Humans have been studying Jupiter for hundreds of years, yet many basic questions about the gas world remain: How did it form? What is its internal structure? Exactly how does it generate its vast magnetic field? What can it tell us about the formation of other planets inside and outside our solar system? Beginning in July, we’ll be a little closer to the answers.

OSIRIS-REx Takes Flight

The OSIRIS-REx mission, short for Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer, sets sail for an asteroid in September. The spacecraft will use a robotic arm to pluck samples from the asteroid Bennu to help better explain our solar system’s formation and even find clues to how life began.

Dawn Sees Ceres Up Close

After an odyssey of many years and millions of miles, in December the Dawn spacecraft entered its final, lowest mapping orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres. The intriguing world’s odd mountains, craters and salty deposits are ready for their close-ups. We can expect new images of the starkly beautiful surface for months.

Cassini Commences Its Grand Finale

In late 2016, the Cassini spacecraft will begin a daring set of orbits called the Grand Finale, which will be in some ways like a whole new mission. Beginning this year and extending into next, the spacecraft will repeatedly climb high above Saturn’s poles, flying just outside its narrow F ring 20 times. After a last targeted Titan flyby, the spacecraft will then dive between Saturn’s uppermost atmosphere and its innermost ring 22 times. As Cassini plunges past Saturn, the spacecraft will collect rich and valuable information far beyond the mission’s original plan.

New Horizons Sends More Postcards from Pluto

We have stared slack-jawed at the images and discoveries from last year’s Pluto flyby, but the fact is that most of the data that New Horizons collected remains on board the spacecraft. In 2016, we’ll see a steady release of new pictures — and very likely some expanded answers to longstanding questions.

Mars Missions March Forward

With five of our missions continuing their Martian quests, 2016 should be a good year for discoveries on the Red Planet.

Mars Odyssey

Mars Opportunity

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

Mars Curiosity

MAVEN

Mercury Transits the Sun

A transit is a very rare astronomical event in which a planet passes across the face of the sun. In May, Mercury will transit the sun, on of only thirteen Mercury transits each century on average.

LRO Keeps an Eagle Eye On the Moon

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) will extend its run in 2016, scanning the moon’s surface with its sharp-eyed instruments, investigating everything from lava tube skylights to changes at the Apollo landing sites.

Spacecraft Fly Under Many Flags

Our partner agencies around the world will be flying several new or continuing planetary missions to destinations across the solar system:

Akatsuki at Venus

ExoMars

Mars Express

Mars Orbiter Mission

Rosetta at Comet 67/P

Technology Demonstration Missions Push the Envelope

We’re always looking for new frontiers on distant worlds, as well as the technology that will take us there. This year, several missions are planned to take new ideas for a spin in space:

Deep Space Atomic Clock

NODES

LDSD

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How could your research in diseases help missions to the Moon, Mars and other places in our solar system?

What is your advise to people who wanna be astronaut?