How do we spot something as tiny and faint as a planet trillions of miles away? The trick is to look at the star! So far, most of the exoplanets – worlds beyond our solar system – we’ve found were detected by looking for tiny dips in the brightness of their host stars!
These dips are caused by the planet passing between us and its star – an event called a “transit.” Our newest planet hunter, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), will seek out transits around 200,000 of the nearest and brightest stars in the sky. TESS is slated to launch tomorrow, April 18, at 6:51 p.m. EDT on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
Credit: @NASAGoddard
#nasa #space #exoplanets #planets #astronomy #satellite #picoftheday #spacecraft #tess #science #nasatess #habitableplanets #star #NewWorlds #astrophysics #launch #transit #solarsystem
Today at the National Space Foundation's 34th #SpaceSymposium, Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) congratulated Acting Administrator Lightfoot on his 30 years of service and reemphasized plans to return humans to the Moon. To learn more about our missions what's next for us visit nasa.gov.
What’s up for April in the night sky? The Lyrid Meteor Shower, which peaks on April 22!
Mid-April, start looking for the Lyrid meteors, which are active from April 14 – 30. In the early morning sky, a patient observer will see up to a dozen or more meteors per hour. Observers in the United States should see good meteor rates on the nights before and after the April 22 peak.
A bright first quarter Moon plays havoc with sky conditions, but Lyra will be high overhead after the Moon sets at midnight, so that’s the best time to look for Lyrids!
Credit: NASA
#nasa #space #lyrids #lyridmeteor #meteor #shootingstar #meteorshower #lyra #april #whatsup #nightsky #astronomy #solarsystem #observe #moon #stars #peak
Special delivery! This time-lapse video packs 90 minutes from the SpaceX (@SpaceX) Dragon resupply ship arrival at the International Space Station (@ISS) on April 4 into just one minute.
Captured here is the rendezvous and capture maneuvers as the Dragon cargo craft delivered more than 5,800 pounds of research, equipment, cargo and supplies to the crew living aboard the orbiting laboratory, including science that studies thunderstorms on Earth, space gardening, potential pathogens in space, new ways to patch up wounds and more.
The Dragon spacecraft will spend approximately one month attached to the station. Once the Dragon cargo craft leaves the station, it will conduct its deorbit burn to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Baja California.
Video credit: NASA
#nasa #spacex #earth #international #space #station #cargo #spacex #nasa #spacestation #internationalspacestation #research #dragoncargocraft #science #technology #picofthday
How far is the farthest star we've ever seen? More than halfway across the universe, an enormous blue star nicknamed Icarus was spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope (@NASAHubble) through a quirk of nature that amplified the star's feeble glow. The star, harbored in a very distant spiral galaxy, is so far away that its light has taken 9 billion years to reach Earth. It appears to us as it did when the universe was about 30 percent of its current age.
This video shows a galaxy cluster located about 5 billion light-years from Earth. This massive cluster of galaxies sits between the Earth and the galaxy that contains the distant star. Thanks to a lucky alignment between the cluster, a dense object within it and a distant star, the image of the distant star was magnified by a factor of 2000, making it visible by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Like the galaxy in which the star is located, the star is actually visible several times. However, the light from the second image of the star was redirected by another massive object in the cluster and only became visible when this object moved out of the line of sight.
The video shows the position of the two images of the star within the cluster.
Credit: @europeanspaceagency/Hubble, NASA
#nasa #space #hubble #spothubble #spacetelescope #telescope #galaxy #cluster #star #universe #solarsystem #lightyears #billions #visible #beautiful #earth #video #science
What’s up for April in the night sky? This month, you won’t want to miss red Mars and golden Saturn in the south-southeast sky. By April 7, the Moon joins the pair and if you’re in a dark area, you may see some glow from the nearby Milky Way.
Credit: NASA
#nasa #space #mars #saturn #moon #planets #south #southeast #stargazing #astronomy #solarsystem #pair #milkyway #nightsky #whatsup #lookup #sky #stars #april
LIFTOFF! A #Dragon 🐉 went soaring into the sky atop a @SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket! The Dragon cargo craft will deliver more than 5,800 pounds of research, equipment, cargo and supplies to the crew living aboard the International Space Station (@iss), including science that studies thunderstorms on Earth, space gardening, potential pathogens in space, new ways to patch up wounds and more. Liftoff was at 4:00 p.m. EDT. This was SpaceX’s 14th resupply mission to the orbiting laboratory.
Photo credit: NASA
#spacex #nasa #spacestation #internationalspacestation #research #dragoncargocraft #science #technology #falcon9 #rocket #launch #picofthday
Ready to find some planets? The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is getting ready for launch! TESS is the next step in our search for planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets. This planet hunter will scan nearly the entire sky over two years to monitor 200,000 of the nearest and brightest stars in search of transits - periodic dips in a star’s brightness caused by planets passing in front of their stars.
Led out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, TESS is expected to find thousands of new exoplanets. Powerful telescopes could then study these planets in more detail to help determine what they are made of, and what their atmospheres are like. Stay tuned for more about TESS as we get closer to launch, which is currently scheduled for no earlier than April 16!
Credit: NASA/NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab
We ran together three sequences of the Sun taken in three different extreme ultraviolet wavelengths by our Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) to better illustrate how features that appear in one sequence are difficult, if not impossible, to see in the others (Mar. 20-21, 2018). In the red sequence, we can see very small jets of solar material burst from the Sun’s surface and some small prominences, bright features extending outward, at the edge, which are not easily discerned in the other two sequences.
In the second clip, we can readily observe a coronal hole, the large and dark region where the Sun's magnetic field is open to interplanetary space, though it is difficult to distinguish in the others.
In the third clip, we can see strands of plasma waving above the surface, especially above the one small, but bright, active region near the right edge.
These are just three of the 10 extreme ultraviolet wavelengths in which SDO images the Sun every 12 seconds every day. That's a lot of data and a lot of science!
Credit: NASA/Solar Dynamics Observatory
#nasa #space #sun #solar #sdo #light #earth #solarsystem #science #video #ultraviolet #uv #uvlight #picoftheday
The March morning sky offers some dazzling views of Mars and Saturn all month long. Through a telescope, you can almost make out some of the surface features on the Red Planet.
Look a little farther into Mars’ future and circle May 5 on your calendars – that’s when our InSight lander will launch to the Red Planet on a 6 month journey. During that time, Mars will be easily visible in the sky.
Keep watching Mars as it travels closer to Earth. It will be closest in late July, when the Red Planet will appear larger in apparent diameter than it has since 2003.
Credit: NASA
#credit #nasa #space #astronomy #whatsup #nightsky #sky #stargazing #solarsystem #universe #planets #stars #moon #mars #insight #lander #journey
What’s up in the sky this month? You’re in for a real treat if you’re able to get away to a dark sky location on a Moonless night this month. The Zodiacal light and the Milky Way intersect!
The Zodiacal light is a faint triangular glow seen from a dark sky just after sunset in the spring or just before sunrise in the fall. The more familiar Milky Way is one of the spiral arms of our galaxy.
What we’re seeing is sunlight reflecting off dust grains that circle the Sun in the inner solar system. These dust grains journey across our sky in the ecliptic – the same plane as the Moon and the planets.
Credit: NASA
#credit #nasa #space #astronomy #whatsup #nightsky #sky #stargazing #solarsystem #universe #planets #stars #moon #zodiacal #light #milkyway #dust #galaxy #lookup
Curious about what objects you can spot in the night sky this month? We can help!
Both Venus and Mercury will be visible in the evening sky this month. At the beginning of this month, they appear low on the western horizon. The Moon itself joins the pair from March 18 – 20.
The Moon will then skim by the Pleiades star cluster and Taurus’ bright red star, named Aldebaran, on the next few evenings – March 21 – 23.
Jupiter – king of the planets – rises just before midnight this month, and earlier by month end. Even through the smallest telescope or average binoculars, you should see the four Galilean moons – Europa, Io, Callisto and Ganymede.
So get outside this month and look up!
Credit: NASA
#credit #nasa #space #astronomy #whatsup #nightsky #sky #stargazing #solarsystem #universe #planets #stars #moon #venus #mercury #jupiter #cluster #taurus #pleiades #aldebaran #lookup
LIFT OFF! The United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (@noaa) next-generation weather satellite – GOES-S onboard, launched at 5:02 p.m. EST from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
GOES-S is the second satellite in NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) – R Series. GOES-R, the first satellite in the series, launched in November 2016 and is now GOES-16. GOES-S will be designated GOES-17 upon reaching geostationary orbit. After a period of on-orbit test and checkout, GOES-17 will be operational as GOES-West, providing coverage of the western U.S., Alaska, Hawaii and the Pacific Ocean. Together, GOES-16 and GOES-17 will observe Earth from the west coast of Africa all the way to Guam, providing researchers and meteorologists with valuable data on weather systems five times faster and at four times the image resolution than previous GOES spacecraft, offering more accurate, reliable forecasts and severe weather outlooks.
Credit: NASA
#space #rocket #goess #goes17 #noaa #weather #satellite #rocketlaunch #picoftheday #nasa #ula #atlasv #launch #liftoff #Earth #meteorology
As recently as 2010, only 3 percent of Cambodia’s domestically generated electricity came from hydropower. By 2016, hydropower was the source of 60 percent of it. Completion of the Lower Sesan II dam in Stung Treng province will give hydropower yet another boost. At full capacity, the project is designed to generate 400 megawatts of electricity, making it the biggest hydropower station in the country.
Our satellite captured these before and after natural-color images of the dam and reservoir. The first image was acquired on February 14, 2017; the second one shows the same area on February 1, 2018. The brown and light green areas in the first image, particularly those with straight edges, were likely cleared recently for timber; some of the smaller tan areas were crop fields near villages. Densely forested areas are green.
In a country where only 50 percent of rural communities have access to the electrical grid, the boost in generating capacity will help with a government-led effort to bring electricity to all Cambodians by 2022. The project is also expected to reduce the cost of electricity. However, the dam and its 75 square-kilometer (29 square-mile) reservoir will also have significant impacts on communities near the river. Though some communities have resisted moving, rising waters have forced thousands of people to leave their villages. Scientists have cautioned that the Mekong Basin could see a 9 percent drop in the availability of fish.
Credit: NASA /Joshua Stevens
#nasa #space #earth #water #renewableenergy #power #electricity #cambodia #reservoir #dam #sesan #suntreng #picoftheday #hydropower #science #sustainability
A magnetic power struggle of galactic proportions - new research highlights the role of the Sun's magnetic landscape in the development of solar eruptions that can trigger space weather events around Earth.
Using data from our Solar Dynamics Observatory, scientists examined an October 2014 Jupiter-sized sunspot group, an area of complex magnetic fields, often the site of solar activity. This was the biggest group in the past two solar cycles and a highly active region. Though conditions seemed ripe for an eruption, the region never produced a major coronal mass ejection (CME) – a massive, bubble-shaped eruption of solar material and magnetic field – on its journey across the Sun. It did, however, emit a powerful X-class flare, the most intense class of flares. What determines, the scientists wondered, whether a flare is associated with a CME?
The scientists found that a magnetic cage physically prevented a CME from erupting that day. Just hours before the flare, the sunspot’s natural rotation contorted the magnetic rope and it grew increasingly twisted and unstable, like a tightly coiled rubber band.
Credits: Tahar Amari et al./Center for Theoretical Physics/École Polytechnique/NASA Goddard/Joy Ng
#nasa #space #sun #solar #flare #solarsystem #solar #science #green #hot #fire #magnetic #eruption #gif
This animation blinks between two images of our Mars Phoenix Lander. The first – dark smudges on the planet’s surface. The second – the same Martian terrain nearly a decade later, covered in dust. Our Mars orbiter captured this shot as it surveyed the planet from orbit: the first in 2008. The second: late 2017.
In August 2008, Phoenix completed its three-month mission studying Martian ice, soil and atmosphere. The lander worked for two additional months before reduced sunlight caused energy to become insufficient to keep the lander functioning. The solar-powered robot was not designed to survive through the dark and cold conditions of a Martian arctic winter.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona
#nasa #space #mars #phoenix #lander #science #redplanet #martian #ice #soil #dust #gif #spacecraft #solarsystem
Sputters and spurts on the Sun’s only visible active region eventually unleashed this brief, bright flare on Feb. 7. The flare appears about mid-way through the half-day clip. Normally, we do not pay much attention to flares this small, but it was just about the only real solar activity over the week around Feb. 7 as the Sun is slowing approaching its quiet period of the 11-year solar cycle.
These images were taken in a wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light.
Credit: NASA/SDO
#nasa #space #solar #flare #sun #spurt #sputter #active #solarsystem #spacecraft #star #mission #observatory #science
