This weekend, Mars is closer to Earth than it's been in 15 years, visible as a bright, reddish jewel in the sky. We took a closer look with the Hubble Space Telescope (@NASAHubble) and saw images of dark red dust in Mars’ atmosphere, the result of a storm raging across the entire planet. Also in our night sky right now? Saturn -- Hubble took some beautiful new snapshots of the ringed planet as well.
Using advanced algorithms, a team of scientists found never-before-detected, fine-grained structures in the Sun’s million-degree atmosphere, also known as the corona. This finding could help answer questions related to the stream of charged particles that flow outward from the Sun, known as solar wind.
In deep space, the solar wind is turbulent and gusty, but how did it get that way? Did it leave the Sun smooth, and become turbulent as it crossed the solar system, or are the gusts telling us about the Sun itself? Answering this question requires observing the outer corona — the source of the solar wind — in extreme detail. If the Sun itself causes the turbulence in the solar wind, then we should be able to see complex structures right from the beginning of the wind’s journey.
But existing data didn’t show such fine-grained structure — at least, until now.
Currently orbiting our Moon, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) sends back data and stunning images of Earth's closest neighbor. Launched in 2009, LRO has collected a treasure trove of data about the Moon's surface, as well as changes to its gravity and surface temperatures. The full Moon this week gives you the chance to see some of the same features LRO captures up close. Learn more: https://www.nasa.gov/LRO
Happy #NationalMoonDay! To celebrate the 49th anniversary of #Apollo11 Moon landing, we present you with “Moonlight,” a video by one of our @NASAGoddard Visualizers set to Debussy’s Clair de Lune. The visualization was compiled using 9 years of topographic and visual data from our Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to create a stunning portrait of one lunar cycle. Make sure to turn the sound on! 🔊
In celebration of baseball's All-Star Game, our administrator Jim Bridenstine shares imagery from a unique perspective -- views of the cities with Major League Baseball (@MLB) stadiums as captured by our astronauts on the International Space Station (@ISS), located 250 miles above Earth.
Humans are going back to the Moon. And when we get there, we plan to stay for a while. We take you behind the scenes @NASA to show five ways we’re working to get astronauts back to the Moon for long-term exploration and preparation for human missions to Mars and deeper into our solar system. Learn more about our plans to return to the Moon: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasas-exploration-campaign-back-to-the-moon-and-on-to-mars
A room with Earth views! 🌎Earlier this week, astronaut Ricky Arnold (@astro_ricky) captured this spectacular view of our home planet while he was orbiting at a speed of 17,500 miles per hour. If you’re wondering where in the world this video was taken, it starts as the International Space Station (@ISS) is above San Francisco and moving southward through the Americas. Each day, the station completes 16 orbits of our home planet as the six humans living and working aboard our orbiting laboratory conduct important science and research. Their work will not only benefit life here on Earth, but will help us venture deeper into space than ever before.
Aerospace engineers take you on a tour of the Kraken – the Disorientation Research Device at Naval Medical Research Unit in Dayton, Ohio. We're working with a U.S. Navy research team to develop and evaluate cockpit displays to help pilots recover from upsets or unusual attitudes.
This animation shows a supermassive black hole billions of times the mass of the Sun. This particular black hole anchors a type of galaxy called a blazar, which produces two jets of particles moving at nearly the speed of light — one of which points almost directly at Earth.
On September 22, our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope saw a powerful flare of high-energy light from this blazar. At the same time, the National Science Foundation’s (@nsfgov) IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole detected a neutrino — a high-energy cosmic particle — from the same direction.
The neutrino was the first we’ve ever detected from a source outside our galactic neighborhood, and this discovery is also the first time we’ve seen light and a neutrino from the same black hole source. Fermi and IceCube’s work represents a new chapter in multimessenger astronomy – viewing the same event using different messengers like light, particles and gravitational waves.
#nasa #space #science #astronomy #blackhole #galaxy #light #particles #gammaray #blazar #neutrino
NASA’s study of our home planet includes the cryosphere — the frozen regions of the world — and specifically, how it changes. For 10 years, scientists and engineers with NASA’s Operation IceBridge have flown over glaciers, sea ice and ice sheets, measuring the height of the ice and tracking how it changes from season to season. Learn more at http://www.nasa.gov/icebridge
Happy Independence Day this #FourthOfJuly! Since the beginning of human space flight, our astronauts, rockets and spacecraft have proudly carried the American flag to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, and beyond. Watch & take a look: https://go.nasa.gov/USflag
What's up in the night sky? Enjoy a ringside seat for Saturn! Saturn is at opposition tonight, June 27th, when it and the Sun are on opposite sides of Earth. It rises at sunset and sets at sunrise.
Great Saturn viewing will last several more months. The best views will be just after midnight. All year, the rings have been tilted wide open--almost 26 degrees wide this month--giving us a great view of Saturn's distinctive rings. The tilt offers us a view of the north polar region. Near Saturn, the brightest asteroid--Vesta--is so bright that it can be seen with your unaided eye. It will be visible for several months. A detailed star chart will help you pick out the asteroid from the stars. The summer Milky way provides a glittery backdrop.
The International Space Station is a specialized laboratory that orbits the Earth every 90 minutes. Research conducted on the @ISS is helping us take humans further into deep space, and benefits our home planet.
To follow the latest in space station science, and learn how to get your research into space, click here: https://www.nasa.gov/iss-science.
The heat is on 🔥! Our Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite captured a relatively small - see the Earth inset for scale - prominence hovering over the Sun’s surface on June 12-14 before breaking off into space. Prominences are clouds of solar material suspended above the Sun’s surface by the solar magnetic field – the same complex magnetism that drives solar events like flares and coronal mass ejections. The solar material in the prominence streams along the Sun’s magnetic field lines before it thins out and gradually breaks away from the solar surface.
Credit: NASA/SDO
What's up in the night sky this month? Enjoy a ringside seat for Saturn, plus a nightlong parade featuring Venus, Jupiter, Mars and Vesta! Learn about all this and more from a @NASAJPL astronomer.
Neil, Paul and Gavin from Irish wedding band Jaker & Co whipped out the ukuleles to entertain passengers on our recent flight from Barcelona to Dublin 👏🎸 #singit #tune #RyanairStories
A powerful X-ray pulsar is whipping around its stellar partner at a record-breaking speed! These two stars orbit each other every 38 minutes, less than the amount of time it takes to stream an episode of your favorite tv sitcom. It’s the fastest-known orbit for this kind of binary star system, where a rapidly spinning, very dense star called a pulsar pulls material away from a lighter companion star. In this visualization you can see that the two stars in this system are closer to each other than Earth is to the Moon! Scientists were able to confirm the new record using our Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer aboard the International Space Station (@ISS). Credit: @NASAGoddard
#nasa #space #spacetelescope #star #universe #science #binarystars #pulsar #spacestation #iss #nicer #neutronstar #stars #xrays #orbit #space
If you viewed Jupiter last month, you can expect the view to be even better this month! As the largest planet in our solar system, Jupiter will be at its brightest tonight when reaches opposition. Opposition occurs when a planet is near the point in its orbit where it is closest to the Earth, making it appear brighter than it does during any other time in its orbit. This means that Jupiter will be visible all night long, rising in the East around sunset and setting to the West around sunrise.
