Outer Space

Snake robot is being built by NASA to explore Saturn's icy moon

Neptune’s Disappearing Clouds Linked to the Solar Cycle 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. Neptune is the eighth and farthest known planet from the Sun. It is the fourth-largest planet in the Solar System by diameter, the third-most-massive planet, and the densest giant planet. It is 17 times the mass of Earth, and slightly more massive than fellow ice giant Uranus. Neptune is denser and physically smaller than Uranus because its greater mass causes more gravitational compression of its atmosphere. Being composed primarily of gases and liquids, it has no well-defined solid surface. The planet orbits the Sun once every 164.8 years at an orbital distance of 30.1 astronomical units (4.5 billion kilometres; 2.8 billion miles). It is named after the Roman god of the sea and has the astronomical symbol ♆, representing Neptune's trident.

Beautiful Aurora Borealis over the Mountains of Switzerland 5-10-2024 An aurora also commonly known as the northern lights - aurora borealis - or southern lights (aurora australis),[c] is a natural light display in Earth's sky, predominantly seen in high-latitude regions (around the Arctic and Antarctic). Auroras display dynamic patterns of brilliant lights that appear as curtains, rays, spirals, or dynamic flickers covering the entire sky. Auroras are the result of disturbances in the Earth's magnetosphere caused by the solar wind. Major disturbances result from enhancements in the speed of the solar wind from coronal holes and coronal mass ejections. These disturbances alter the trajectories of charged particles in the magnetospheric plasma. These particles, mainly electrons and protons, precipitate into the upper atmosphere (thermosphere/exosphere). The resulting ionization and excitation of atmospheric constituents emit light of varying colour and complexity. The form of the aurora, occurring within bands around both polar regions, is also dependent on the amount of acceleration imparted to the precipitating particles.

How you wash your hair in space: demonstrated by astronaut Karen Nyberg on the International Space Station Washing Hair in Space How do you wash your hair in space? It's a fun question to think about and NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg is on hand to show you exactly how it's done while on board the International Space Station. Washing Hair in Space Water acts differently in space so washing your hair definitely requires a special technique, check out the video and get some fun hair tips in case you find yourself in space one day!

NASA Simulation’s Plunge Into a Black Hole: Explained This new, immersive visualization produced on a NASA supercomputer represents a scenario where a camera — a stand-in for a daring astronaut — enters the event horizon, sealing its fate. Goddard scientists created the visualizations on the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation. The destination is a supermassive black hole with 4.3 million times the mass of our Sun, equivalent to the monster located at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. To simplify the complex calculations, the black hole is not rotating. A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing, including light and other electromagnetic waves, is capable of possessing enough energy to escape it. Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform spacetime to form a black hole.[3][4] The boundary of no escape is called the event horizon. A black hole has a great effect on the fate and circumstances of an object crossing it, but it has no locally detectable features according to general relativity.[5] In many ways, a black hole acts like an ideal black body, as it reflects no light. Quantum field theory in curved spacetime predicts that event horizons emit Hawking radiation, with the same spectrum as a black body of a temperature inversely proportional to its mass. This temperature is of the order of billionths of a kelvin for stellar black holes, making it essentially impossible to observe directly.

Audio coming from inside the space capsule during the Apollo 1 disaster Apollo 1, initially designated AS-204, was planned to be the first crewed mission of the Apollo program,[1] the American undertaking to land the first man on the Moon. It was planned to launch on February 21, 1967, as the first low Earth orbital test of the Apollo command and service module. The mission never flew; a cabin fire during a launch rehearsal test at Cape Kennedy Air Force Station Launch Complex 34 on January 27 killed all three crew members—Command Pilot Gus Grissom, Senior Pilot Ed White, and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee—and destroyed the command module (CM). The name Apollo 1, chosen by the crew, was made official by NASA in their honor after the fire.

In the absence of gravity, flames will tend to be spherical, as shown in this NASA experiment Great balls of fire: How flames behave in space It’s a process called molecular diffusion, and it produces spherical flames that are different from their Earthly counterparts in more ways than one. Not only do they burn much slower and for longer periods of time, but they also survive on less oxygen and clock in at less than 900 degrees Fahrenheit — a fraction of the heat given off by most terrestrial flames. And yet, there’s still much scientists don’t understand about how fire operates in microgravity. Are certain materials more flammable than others? What’s the best way to extinguish a rogue flame? These questions are critical for the safety of astronauts already living and working in the International Space Station (ISS), and will only become more important as humans prepare for longer space voyages. Luckily, NASA scientists are on the case. https://www.astronomy.com/science/great-balls-of-fire-how-flames-behave-in-space/

Hubble Captures Supernova’s Light Echo Over a period of two and a half years, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope observed the "light echo" of supernova SN 2014J in galaxy M82, located 11.4 million light-years away The Hubble Space Telescope (often referred to as HST or Hubble) is a space telescope that was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990 and remains in operation. It was not the first space telescope, but it is one of the largest and most versatile, renowned as a vital research tool and as a public relations boon for astronomy. The Hubble telescope is named after astronomer Edwin Hubble and is one of NASA's Great Observatories. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) selects Hubble's targets and processes the resulting data, while the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) controls the spacecraft. A supernova is a powerful and luminous explosion of a star. A supernova occurs during the last evolutionary stages of a massive star, or when a white dwarf is triggered into runaway nuclear fusion. The original object, called the progenitor, either collapses to a neutron star or black hole, or is completely destroyed to form a diffuse nebula. The peak optical luminosity of a supernova can be comparable to that of an entire galaxy before fading over several weeks or months

Raw Footage of Jupiter from Voyager 1 (1979) Voyager 1 is a space probe launched by NASA on September 5, 1977, as part of the Voyager program to study the outer Solar System and the interstellar space beyond the Sun's heliosphere. It was launched 16 days after its twin Voyager 2. It communicates through the NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) to receive routine commands and to transmit data to Earth. Real-time distance and velocity data is provided by NASA and JPL. At a distance of 162.7 AU (24.3 billion km; 15.1 billion mi) from Earth as of May 2024, it is the most distant human-made object from Earth. The probe made flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, and Saturn's largest moon, Titan. NASA had a choice of either doing a Pluto or Titan flyby; exploration of the moon took priority because it was known to have a substantial atmosphere. Voyager 1 studied the weather, magnetic fields, and rings of the two gas giants and was the first probe to provide detailed images of their moons.

Bright meteor captured in Hiratsuka, Japan May 1, 2024

Proton M Rocket Launch Failure and Explosion July 2013, a Proton-M/DM-03 carrying three GLONASS satellites failed shortly after liftoff. The booster began pitching left and right along the vertical axis within a few seconds of launch. Attempts by the onboard guidance computer to correct the flight trajectory failed and ended up putting it into an unrecoverable pitchover. The upper stages and payload were stripped off 24 seconds after launch due to the forces experienced followed by the first stage breaking apart and erupting in flames. Impact with the ground occurred 30 seconds after liftoff. The preliminary report of the investigation into the July 2013 failure indicated that three of the first stage angular velocity sensors, responsible for yaw control, were installed in an incorrect orientation. As the error affected the redundant sensors as well as the primary ones, the rocket was left with no yaw control, which resulted in the failure.[21] Telemetry data also indicated that a pad umbilical had detached prematurely, suggesting that the Proton may have launched several tenths of a second early, before the engines reached full thrust.

How to Sleep on the International Space Station ISS The International Space Station (ISS) is a large space station assembled and maintained in low Earth orbit by a collaboration of five space agencies: NASA (United States), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA (Japan), ESA (Europe), CSA (Canada), and their contractors. ISS is the largest space station ever built. Its primary purpose is performing microgravity and space environment experiments. Sleeping in space is part of space medicine and mission planning, with impacts on the health, capabilities and morale of astronauts How do astronauts sleep in space? Between zero gravity and small sleeping quarters, astronauts have to sleep in space, even if it’s difficult. On the International Space Station (ISS), an astronaut sleeps in quarters roughly the size of a phone booth. They cocoon themselves in a sleeping bag tethered to a wall. There is no “up” or “down” in space. With zero gravity, an astronaut floats around the cabin while sleeping, potentially injuring themselves if not tethered in place. “It felt odd,” notes Scott Kelly in a recent interview. Kelly is a retired astronaut who spent 520 days in space. It was strange for Kelly to sleep without the weight of a blanket or the comfort of a pillow to rest his head. https://www.astronomy.com/space-exploration/how-do-astronauts-sleep-in-space/ How to Sleep on the International Space Station ISS How to Sleep on the International Space Station ISS

The color of a star is a function of its surface temperature As a star's temperature increases, as a result of there being more gas in the star – and hence more fuel to burn – it becomes hotter. Its color changes from orange, through yellow, to white. Hottest stars are blue, with temperatures up to 40,000ºC. Coolest stars are red with surface temperatures of about 3,000ºC. Look at the beautiful picture of the stars in the Sagittarius Star Cloud. The stars show a multitude of colors, including red, orange, yellow, white, and blue. As we have seen, stars are not all the same color because they do not all have identical temperatures. To define color precisely, astronomers have devised quantitative methods for characterizing the color of a star and then using those colors to determine stellar temperatures. In the chapters that follow, we will provide the temperature of the stars we are describing, and this section tells you how those temperatures are determined from the colors of light the stars give off. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-astronomy/chapter/colors-of-stars/ A normal star is a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by self-gravity.[1] The nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye at night; their immense distances from Earth make them appear as fixed points of light. The most prominent stars have been categorised into constellations and asterisms, and many of the brightest stars have proper names. Astronomers have assembled star catalogues that identify the known stars and provide standardized stellar designations. The observable universe contains an estimated 1022 to 1024 stars. Only about 4,000 of these stars are visible to the naked eye—all within the Milky Way galaxy There are seven spectral classes of stars, based on the effective temperatures of their surfaces. In order of descending temperature, they are: O, B, A, F, G, K, and M. O stars are the very hottest, brightest stars, and M stars are the very coolest, dimmest stars

NASA’s SDO Watches a Sunspot Turn Toward Earth An active region on the sun — an area of intense and complex magnetic fields — has rotated into view on the sun and seems to be growing rather quickly in this video captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Such sunspots are a common occurrence on the sun, but are less frequent as we head toward solar minimum, which is the period of low solar activity during its regular approximately 11-year cycle. This sunspot is the first to appear after the sun was spotless for two days, and it is the only sunspot group at this moment. Like freckles on the face of the sun, they appear to be small features, but size is relative: The dark core of this sunspot is actually larger than Earth. Sunspots are temporary spots on the Sun's surface that are darker than the surrounding area. They are regions of reduced surface temperature caused by concentrations of magnetic flux that inhibit convection. Sunspots appear within active regions, usually in pairs of opposite magnetic polarity. Their number varies according to the approximately 11-year solar cycle Individual sunspots or groups of sunspots may last anywhere from a few days to a few months, but eventually decay. Sunspots expand and contract as they move across the surface of the Sun, with diameters ranging from 16 km (10 mi)[3] to 160,000 km (100,000 mi). Larger sunspots can be visible from Earth without the aid of a telescope. They may travel at relative speeds, or proper motions, of a few hundred meters per second when they first emerge.

Launch And Crash Of The First SpaceX Falcon 1 Rocket From Kwajelein March 24, 2006 Falcon 1 made five launches. The first three failed, however the subsequent two flights were successful, the first successful launch making it the first privately funded and developed liquid-propellant rocket to reach orbit. 203  The fifth launch was its first commercial flight, and placed RazakSAT into low Earth orbit

When we talk about the enormity of the cosmos, it’s easy to toss out big numbers – but far more difficult to wrap our minds around just how large, how far, and how numerous celestial bodies really are. How big is our Milky Way Galaxy and how far away are exoplanets, the planets beyond our solar system? The Milky Way[c] is the galaxy that includes the Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye

The giant planet Jupiter, in all its banded glory, takes the spotlight in these new images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope that capture both sides of the planet. The Hubble Space Telescope (often referred to as HST or Hubble) is a space telescope that was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990 and remains in operation. It was not the first space telescope, but it is one of the largest and most versatile, renowned as a vital research tool and as a public relations boon for astronomy. The Hubble telescope is named after astronomer Edwin Hubble and is one of NASA's Great Observatories. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) selects Hubble's targets and processes the resulting data, while the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) controls the spacecraft.

This new NASA animation highlights the “super” in supermassive black holes. These monsters lurk in the centers of most big galaxies, including our own Milky Way, and contain between 100,000 and tens of billions of times more mass than our Sun black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing, including light and other electromagnetic waves, is capable of possessing enough energy to escape it. Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform spacetime to form a black hole. The boundary of no escape is called the event horizon. A black hole has a great effect on the fate and circumstances of an object crossing it, but it has no locally detectable features according to general relativity.

Houston, we've had a problem” is the now famous phrase radioed from Apollo 13 to Mission Control upon the catastrophic explosion that dramatically changed the mission. The Apollo 13 mission has become known as “a successful failure” that saw the safe return of its crew Commander James (Jim) Lovell Jr., Command Module Pilot John Swigert Jr. and Lunar Module Pilot Fred Haise Jr.

Apollo 1, initially designated AS-204, was planned to be the first crewed mission of the Apollo program,[1] the American undertaking to land the first man on the Moon. It was planned to launch on February 21, 1967, as the first low Earth orbital test of the Apollo command and service module. The mission never flew; a cabin fire during a launch rehearsal test at Cape Kennedy Air Force Station Launch Complex 34 on January 27

Astronaut Neil Armstrong Describes What Space Looks Like From the Surface of the Moon Neil Alden Armstrong (August 5, 1930 – August 25, 2012) was an American astronaut and aeronautical engineer who in 1969 became the first person to walk on the Moon. He was also a naval aviator, test pilot, and university professor

How many Earths can fit into each planet Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to harbor life. This is enabled by Earth being a water world, the only one in the Solar System sustaining liquid surface water. Almost all of Earth's water is contained in its global ocean, covering 70.8% of Earth's crust. The remaining 29.2% of Earth's crust is land, most of which is located in the form of continental landmasses within Earth's land hemisphere. Most of Earth's land is somewhat humid and covered by vegetation, while large sheets of ice at Earth's polar deserts retain more water than Earth's groundwater, lakes, rivers and atmospheric water combined. Earth's crust consists of slowly moving tectonic plates, which interact to produce mountain ranges, volcanoes, and earthquakes. Earth has a liquid outer core that generates a magnetosphere capable of deflecting most of the destructive solar winds and cosmic radiation

Solar eclipse seen from an airplane in mid-flight

GOES-East satellite view of solar eclipse - April 8, 2024

Solar Eclipse as seen from the International Space Station April 8, 2024 On April 8, 2024, a total solar eclipse moved across North America, passing over Mexico, the United States, and Canada. A total solar eclipse happens when the Moon passes between the Sun and Earth, completely blocking the face of the Sun. The sky will darken as if it were dawn or dusk. Safety is the number one priority when viewing a total solar eclipse. Be sure you're familiar with when you need to wear specialized eye protection designed for solar viewing by reviewing these safety guidelines. solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun, thereby obscuring the view of the Sun from a small part of Earth, totally or partially. Such an alignment occurs approximately every six months, during the eclipse season in its new moon phase, when the Moon's orbital plane is closest to the plane of Earth's orbit. In a total eclipse, the disk of the Sun is fully obscured by the Moon. In partial and annular eclipses, only part of the Sun is obscured. Unlike a lunar eclipse, which may be viewed from anywhere on the night side of Earth, a solar eclipse can only be viewed from a relatively small area of the world. As such, although total solar eclipses occur somewhere on Earth every 18 months on average, they recur at any given place only once every 360 to 410 years If the Moon were in a perfectly circular orbit and in the same orbital plane as Earth, there would be total solar eclipses once a month, at every new moon. Instead, because the Moon's orbit is tilted at about 5 degrees to Earth's orbit, its shadow usually misses Earth. Solar (and lunar) eclipses therefore happen only during eclipse seasons, resulting in at least two, and up to five, solar eclipses each year, no more than two of which can be total. Total eclipses are rarer because they require a more precise alignment between the centers of the Sun and Moon, and because the Moon's apparent size in the sky is sometimes too small to fully cover the Sun. The International Space Station (ISS) is a large space station assembled and maintained in low Earth orbit by a collaboration of five space agencies: NASA (United States), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA (Japan), ESA (Europe), CSA (Canada), and their contractors. ISS is the largest space station ever built. Its primary purpose is performing microgravity and space environment experiments