The Shrinking Aral Sea

O_o  When we peer deep into space, we don't expect to find something staring back at us...

This galactic ghoul, captured by our Hubble Space Telescope, is actually a titanic head-on collision between two galaxies. Each "eye" is the bright core of a galaxy, one of which slammed into another. The outline of the face is a ring of young blue stars. Other clumps of new stars form a nose and mouth.

Although galaxy collisions are common most of them are not head-on smashups like this Arp-Madore system. Get spooked & find out what lies inside this ghostly apparition, here. 

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Solar System: Things to Know

Help us find the most interesting spots to image on Jupiter, learn how Hubble is helping the Voyager craft find their way and more!

1. Calling All Citizen Scientists!

Join the Mission Juno virtual imaging team by helping us to determine the best locations in Jupiter's atmosphere that JunoCam will capture. Voting is open January 19-23, 2017. Visit www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam for more information about JunoCam voting.

2. Leading the Way

Our Hubble Space Telescope is providing a road map for the two Voyager spacecraft as they hurtle through unexplored territory on their trip beyond our solar system. Along the way, the Voyager craft are measuring the interstellar medium, the mysterious environment between stars. Hubble is measuring the material along the probes' future trajectories and even after the Voyagers run out of electrical power and are unable to send back new data, which may happen in about a decade, astronomers can use Hubble observations to characterize the environment of through which these silent ambassadors will glide.

3. Explorers Wanted

Mars needs YOU! In the future, Mars will need all kinds of explorers, farmers, surveyors, teachers . . . but most of all YOU! Join us on the Journey to Mars as we explore with robots and send humans there one day. Download a Mars poster that speaks to you. Be an explorer!

4. Tracking Every Sol

Each sol, or Martian day, the Mars Curiosity Team tracks the rover’s progress. And you can track them too at: http://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission/mars-rover-curiosity-mission-updates/. 

5. Happy 425th birthday,  Pierre Gassendi

January 22 is the 425th birthday of Pierre Gassendi, French philosopher, priest, scientist, astronomer, mathematician and an active observational scientist. He was the first to publish data on the 1631 transit of Mercury. The Lunar Crater Gassendi is named for him.

Discover the full list of 10 things to know about our solar system this week HERE.

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Scary Space Stories to Tell in the Dark

The universe is full of dazzling sights, but there’s an eerie side of space, too. Nestled between the stars, shadowy figures lurk unseen. The entire galaxy could even be considered a graveyard, full of long-dead stars. And it’s not just the Milky Way – the whole universe is a bit like one giant haunted house! Our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will illuminate all kinds of spine-chilling cosmic mysteries when it launches in 2027, but for now settle in for some true, scary space stories.

Flickering Lights

One of the first signs that things are about to get creepy in a scary movie is when the lights start to flicker. That happens all the time in space, too! But instead of being a sinister omen, it can help us find planets circling other stars.

Roman will stare toward the heart of our galaxy and watch to see when pairs of stars appear to align in the sky. When that happens, the nearer star – and orbiting planets – can lens light from the farther star, creating a brief brightening. That’s because every massive object warps the fabric of space-time, changing the path light takes when it passes close by. Roman could find around 1,000 planets using this technique, which is called microlensing.

The mission will also see little flickers when planets cross in front of their host star as they orbit and temporarily dim the light we receive from the star. Roman could find an additional 100,000 planets this way!

Galactic Ghosts

Roman is going to be one of the best ghost hunters in the galaxy! Since microlensing relies on an object’s gravity, not its light, it can find all kinds of invisible specters drifting through the Milky Way. That includes rogue planets, which roam the galaxy alone instead of orbiting a star…

…and solo stellar-mass black holes, which we can usually only find when they have a visible companion, like a star. Astronomers think there should be 100 million of these black holes in our galaxy.

Stellar Skeletons

Black holes aren’t the only dead stars hiding in the sky. When stars that aren’t quite massive enough to form black holes run out of fuel, they blast away their outer layers and become neutron stars. These stellar cores are the densest material we can directly observe. One sugar cube of neutron star material would weigh about 1 billion tons (or 1 trillion kilograms) on Earth! Roman will be able to detect when these extreme objects collide.

Smaller stars like our Sun have less dramatic fates. After they run out of fuel, they swell up and shrug off their outer layers until only a small, hot core called a white dwarf remains. Those outer layers may be recycled into later generations of stars and planets. Roman will explore regions where new stars are bursting to life, possibly containing the remnants of such dead stars.

Cosmic Cobwebs

If we zoom out far enough, the structure of space looks like a giant cobweb! The cosmic web is the large-scale backbone of the universe, made up mainly of a mysterious substance known as dark matter and laced with gas, upon which galaxies are built. Roman will find precise distances for more than 10 million galaxies to map the structure of the cosmos, helping astronomers figure out why the expansion of the universe is speeding up.

Learn more about the exciting science this mission will investigate on Twitter and Facebook.

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NASA’s 60th Anniversary: How It All Began

Congress passed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, on July 16 and President Eisenhower signed it into law on July 29, 1958. We opened for business on Oct. 1, 1958, with T. Keith Glennan as our first administrator. Our history since then tells a story of exploration, innovation and discoveries. The next 60 years, that story continues. Learn more: https://www.nasa.gov/60

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Distance: Hazard Far From Home

A human journey to Mars, at first glance, offers an inexhaustible amount of complexities. To bring a mission to the Red Planet from fiction to fact, our Human Research Program has organized some of the hazards astronauts will encounter on a continual basis into five classifications.

The third and perhaps most apparent hazard is, quite simply, the distance.

Rather than a three-day lunar trip, astronauts would be leaving our planet for roughly three years. Facing a communication delay of up to 20 minutes one way and the possibility of equipment failures or a medical emergency, astronauts must be capable of confronting an array of situations without support from their fellow team on Earth.

Once you burn your engines for Mars, there is no turning back so planning and self-sufficiency are essential keys to a successful Martian mission. The Human Research Program is studying and improving food formulation, processing, packaging and preservation systems.

While International Space Station expeditions serve as a rough foundation for the expected impact on planning logistics for such a trip, the data isn’t always comparable, but it is a key to the solution.

Exploration to the Moon and Mars will expose astronauts to five known hazards of spaceflight, including distance from Earth. To learn more, and find out what our Human Research Program is doing to protect humans in space, check out the "Hazards of Human Spaceflight" website. Or, check out this week’s episode of “Houston We Have a Podcast,” in which host Gary Jordan further dives into the threat of distance with Erik Antonsen, the Assistant Director for Human Systems Risk Management at the Johnson Space Center.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com. 

Extreme Science: Launching Sounding Rockets from The Arctic

This winter, our scientists and engineers traveled to the world's northernmost civilian town to launch rockets equipped with cutting-edge scientific instruments.

This is the beginning of a 14-month-long campaign to study a particular region of Earth's magnetic field — which means launching near the poles. What's it like to launch a science rocket in these extreme conditions?

Our planet is protected by a natural magnetic field that deflects most of the particles that flow out from the Sun — the solar wind — away from our atmosphere. But near the north and south poles, two oddities in Earth's magnetic field funnel these solar particles directly into our atmosphere. These regions are the polar cusps, and it turns out they're the ideal spot for studying how our atmosphere interacts with space.

The scientists of the Grand Challenge Initiative — Cusp are using sounding rockets to do their research. Sounding rockets are suborbital rockets that launch to a few hundred miles in altitude, spending a few minutes in space before falling back to Earth. That means sounding rockets can carry sensitive instruments above our atmosphere to study the Sun, other stars and even distant galaxies.

They also fly directly through some of the most interesting regions of Earth's atmosphere, and that's what scientists are taking advantage of for their Grand Challenge experiments.

One of the ideal rocket ranges for cusp science is in Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard, off the coast of Norway and within the Arctic circle. Because of its far northward position, each morning Svalbard passes directly under Earth's magnetic cusp.

But launching in this extreme, remote environment puts another set of challenges on the mission teams. These launches need to happen during the winter, when Svalbard experiences 24/7 darkness because of Earth's axial tilt. The launch teams can go months without seeing the Sun.

Like for all rocket launches, the science teams have to wait for the right weather conditions to launch. Because they're studying upper atmospheric processes, some of these teams also have to wait for other science conditions, like active auroras. Auroras are created when charged particles collide with Earth’s atmosphere — often triggered by solar storms or changes in the solar wind — and they're related to many of the upper-atmospheric processes that scientists want to study near the magnetic cusp.

But even before launch, the extreme conditions make launching rockets a tricky business — it's so cold that the rockets must be encased in styrofoam before launch to protect them from the low temperatures and potential precipitation.

When all is finally ready, an alarm sounds throughout the town of Ny-Ålesund to alert residents to the impending launch. And then it's up, up and away! This photo shows the launch of the twin VISIONS-2 sounding rockets on Dec. 7, 2018 from Ny-Ålesund.

These rockets are designed to break up during flight — so after launch comes clean-up. The launch teams track where debris lands so that they can retrieve the pieces later.

The next launch of the Grand Challenge Initiative is AZURE, launching from Andøya Space Center in Norway in March 2019.

 For even more about what it's like to launch science rockets in extreme conditions, check out one scientist's notes from the field: https://go.nasa.gov/2QzyjR4

For updates on the Grand Challenge Initiative and other sounding rocket flights, visit nasa.gov/soundingrockets or follow along with NASA Wallops and NASA heliophysics on Twitter and Facebook.

@NASA_Wallops | NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility | @NASASun | NASA Sun Science

Astronaut Training: 5 Things You Need to Know

NASA honored the first class of astronaut candidates to graduate under the Artemis program on Friday, Jan. 10, at our Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Out of a record 18,000 applicants, the 11 new astronauts, alongside two from the Canadian Space Agency, have completed two years of training and are now eligible for spaceflight. One day they could embark on missions to the International Space Station, the Moon and even Mars.

Here are five of the training criteria they had to check off to graduate from astronaut candidate to astronaut:

1. Piloting T-38 Jets

Astronauts have been training in T-38 jets since 1957 because the sleek, white jets require crew members to think quickly in dynamic situations and to make decisions that have real consequences. This type of mental experience is critical to preparing for the rigors of spaceflight. It also familiarizes astronaut candidates with checklists and procedures. To check off this training criteria, candidates must be able to safely operate in the T-38 as either a pilot or back seater. 

2. Knowing International Space Station Systems

We are currently flying astronauts to the International Space Station every few months. Astronauts aboard the space station are conducting experiments benefiting humanity on Earth and teaching us how to live longer in space. Astronaut candidates learn to operate and maintain the complex systems aboard the space station as part of their basic training.

3. Conducting Spacewalks

Spacewalks are the hardest thing, physically and mentally, that astronauts do. Astronaut candidates must demonstrate the skills to complete complex spacewalks in our Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (giant pool used to simulate weightlessness). In order to do so, they will train on the life support systems within the spacesuit, how to handle emergency situations that can arise and how to work effectively as a team to repair the many critical systems aboard the International Space Station to keep it functioning as our science laboratory in space.  

4. Operating Robotics

Astronaut candidates learn the coordinate systems, terminology and how to operate the space station’s two robotic arms called Canadarm2 and Dextre. They train in Canada for a two-week session where they develop more complex robotics skills including capturing visiting cargo vehicles with the arm. The arm, built by the Canadian Space Agency, is capable of handling large cargo and hardware and it helped build the entire space station. It has latches on either end, allowing it to be moved by both flight controllers on the ground and astronauts in space to various parts of the station.

5. Learning Russian Language

The official languages of the International Space Station are English and Russian. All crew members – regardless of what country they come from – are required to know both. NASA astronauts train with their Russian crew mates so it makes sense that they should be able to speak Russian. Astronaut candidates start learning the language at the beginning of their training and train every week, as their schedule allows. 

Now, they are ready for their astronaut pin!

After completing this general training, the new astronauts could be assigned to missions performing research on the International Space Station, launching from American soil on spacecraft built by commercial companies, and launching on deep space missions on our new Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System rocket. 

Watch the Astronaut Candidate Graduation Ceremony

Watch a recording of the astronaut candidate graduation ceremony on our YouTube channel. 

So You Want to Be an Astronaut?

This spring, we’ll once again be accepting applications for the next class of astronauts! Stay tuned to www.nasa.gov/newastronauts for upcoming information on how you can explore places like the Moon and Mars.

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I want to pursue a career in aeronautics and want to get into NASA. Any advice?

Tour the Ocean through the Art of Sound

The ocean is one of the largest ecosystems on our planet. From eye-catching waves to the darkness of the twilight zone, it’s a place filled with mystery and rapid change.

For a scientist studying ocean color at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, there was one more question–what does it sound like?

Before long, a “symphonic ocean experience” was born, combining satellite imagery, ocean color data and programming expertise. Learn more about how data gets converted to music and sound here:

This World Oceans Day, enjoy a tour of the ocean set to sound. Here we go:

SoundCloud

Sounds of the Sea

For World Oceans Month, enjoy a moment of zen with a symphonic tour of the ocean. Experience the swirls off the coast of Río de la Plata to

Bering Sea

This melody explores the phytoplankton blooms in the western Bering Sea along the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula collected by Aqua/MODIS on May 15, 2021. The melody created for this image was aimed at capturing the movement of the eddies or the circular movements of water. Data came from the image’s red, green, and blue channels.

Rio de la Plata

This melody explores a spring bloom in the South Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, lending the water many different shades of green, blue, and brown. The Rio de la Plata estuary in the northwest corner of the above image gets most of its tan coloration from sediments suspended in the water. The melody paired with the data evokes the sediment plumes and swirls happening off the coast.

Coral Sea

Data for the sounds of the Coral Sea were collected over the course of one year from the Aqua/Modis satellite. The information was extracted from a series of 32-day rolling averages for the year 2020, displaying the movement of chlorophyll a data.

Chlorophyll a is a specific form of chlorophyll used in photosynthesis. It absorbs most energy from wavelengths of violet-blue and orange-red light. It is a poor absorber of green and near-green portions of the spectrum, and that’s why it appears green.

Western Australia

Off the coast of western Australia is the appearance of swirls in the ocean. To catch the movement of the Indian Ocean, data was collected from 31 days of imagery examining blue wavelengths of light. The information was gathered from the Suomi-NPP/VIIRS instrument aboard the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) series of spacecraft.

More moments of zen

Looking for more moments of zen? Explore them with NASA’s Soundcloud page, where many are out of this world. Curious on how we get these breathtaking ocean images? Take time to read about Goddard Oceanographer Norman Kuring and how he helped create them.

National Aviation Day!

Today, August 19, is National Aviation Day! You might wonder why we’re celebrating National Aviation Day, let us tell you…

First, did you know that EVERY U.S. commercial aircraft and every U.S. air traffic control tower has NASA-developed technology on board? It’s true! Here at NASA, we're invested in aeronautic research. Today’s air transportation system is an integral part of the U.S. and global economies. 

It’s the primary mechanism for connecting countries across the world through moving people, as well as goods and services. You feel the impacts of aviation and the air transportation system everyday. Just about every product produced and purchased today has been touched by aviation in some way. Aircraft transport 17.7 billion tons of freight every year. While you may not have flown today, something you needed did.

Our aviation experts are dedicated to improving the design of airplanes so they’re more Earth friendly – less fuel use, lower pollution, less noise around airports. We also work with the Federal Aviation Administration to provide new tools to air traffic controllers for improving efficiency and reducing delays.

So, celebrate National Aviation Day with us! Spread Your Wings, take a photo, post it today and tag #SpreadYourWings and/or #NationalAviationDay. We may even pick your photo to highlight on our NASA web page!