Members Can Post Anonymously On This Site
USSF rolls out new Physical Training Uniform at BMT
-
Similar Topics
-
By NASA
Hubble Space Telescope Home NASA’s Hubble, New… Hubble Space Telescope Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Hubble’s Partners in Science Universe Uncovered Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts News Hubble News Hubble News Archive Social Media Media Resources Multimedia Multimedia Images Videos Sonifications Podcasts E-books Lithographs Fact Sheets Glossary Posters Hubble on the NASA App More Online Activities 6 min read
NASA’s Hubble, New Horizons Team Up for a Simultaneous Look at Uranus
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (left) and NASA’s New Horizon’s spacecraft (right) images the planet Uranus. NASA, ESA, STScI, Samantha Hasler (MIT), Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC), New Horizons Planetary Science Theme Team; Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Joseph Olmsted (STScI)
Download this image
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and New Horizons spacecraft simultaneously set their sights on Uranus recently, allowing scientists to make a direct comparison of the planet from two very different viewpoints. The results inform future plans to study like types of planets around other stars.
Astronomers used Uranus as a proxy for similar planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets, comparing high-resolution images from Hubble to the more-distant view from New Horizons. This combined perspective will help scientists learn more about what to expect while imaging planets around other stars with future telescopes.
“While we expected Uranus to appear differently in each filter of the observations, we found that Uranus was actually dimmer than predicted in the New Horizons data taken from a different viewpoint,” said lead author Samantha Hasler of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and New Horizons science team collaborator.
In this image, two three-dimensional shapes (top) of Uranus are compared to the actual views of the planet from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (bottom left) and NASA’s New Horizon’s spacecraft (bottom right). Comparing high-resolution images from Hubble to the smaller view from New Horizons offers a combined perspective that will help researchers learn more about what to expect while imaging planets around other stars with future observatories. NASA, ESA, STScI, Samantha Hasler (MIT), Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC), New Horizons Planetary Science Theme Team; Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Joseph Olmsted (STScI)
Download this image
Direct imaging of exoplanets is a key technique for learning about their potential habitability, and offers new clues to the origin and formation of our own solar system. Astronomers use both direct imaging and spectroscopy to collect light from the observed planet and compare its brightness at different wavelengths. However, imaging exoplanets is a notoriously difficult process because they’re so far away. Their images are mere pinpoints and so are not as detailed as the close-up views that we have of worlds orbiting our Sun. Researchers can also only directly image exoplanets at “partial phases,” when only a portion of the planet is illuminated by their star as seen from Earth.
Uranus was an ideal target as a test for understanding future distant observations of exoplanets by other telescopes for a few reasons. First, many known exoplanets are also gas giants similar in nature. Also, at the time of the observations, New Horizons was on the far side of Uranus, 6.5 billion miles away, allowing its twilight crescent to be studied—something that cannot be done from Earth. At that distance, the New Horizons view of the planet was just several pixels in its color camera, called the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera.
On the other hand, Hubble, with its high resolution, and in its low-Earth orbit 1.7 billion miles away from Uranus, was able to see atmospheric features such as clouds and storms on the day side of the gaseous world.
“Uranus appears as just a small dot on the New Horizons observations, similar to the dots seen of directly-imaged exoplanets from observatories like Webb or ground-based observatories,” added Hasler. “Hubble provides context for what the atmosphere is doing when it was observed with New Horizons.”
The gas giant planets in our solar system have dynamic and variable atmospheres with changing cloud cover. How common is this among exoplanets? By knowing the details of what the clouds on Uranus looked like from Hubble, researchers are able to verify what is interpreted from the New Horizons data. In the case of Uranus, both Hubble and New Horizons saw that the brightness did not vary as the planet rotated, which indicates that the cloud features were not changing with the planet’s rotation.
However, the importance of the detection by New Horizons has to do with how the planet reflects light at a different phase than what Hubble, or other observatories on or near Earth, can see. New Horizons showed that exoplanets may be dimmer than predicted at partial and high phase angles, and that the atmosphere reflects light differently at partial phase.
NASA has two major upcoming observatories in the works to advance studies of exoplanet atmospheres and potential habitability.
“These landmark New Horizons studies of Uranus from a vantage point unobservable by any other means add to the mission’s treasure trove of new scientific knowledge, and have, like many other datasets obtained in the mission, yielded surprising new insights into the worlds of our solar system,” added New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute.
This illustration shows NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft’s view of our solar system from deep in the Kuiper Belt. New Horizons is currently at an estimated distance of more than 5 billion miles from Earth. The probe was 6.5 billion miles away from Uranus when it recently observed the planet. In this study, researchers used the gas giant as an exoplanet proxy, comparing high-resolution images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to the smaller view from New Horizons to learn more about what to expect while imaging planets around other stars. NASA, ESA, Christian Nieves (STScI), Ralf Crawford (STScI), Greg Bacon (STScI)
Download this image
NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, set to launch by 2027, will use a coronagraph to block out a star’s light to directly see gas giant exoplanets. NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory, in an early planning phase, will be the first telescope designed specifically to search for atmospheric biosignatures on Earth-sized, rocky planets orbiting other stars.
“Studying how known benchmarks like Uranus appear in distant imaging can help us have more robust expectations when preparing for these future missions,” concluded Hasler. “And that will be critical to our success.”
Launched in January 2006, New Horizons made the historic flyby of Pluto and its moons in July 2015, before giving humankind its first close-up look at one of these planetary building block and Kuiper Belt object, Arrokoth, in January 2019. New Horizons is now in its second extended mission, studying distant Kuiper Belt objects, characterizing the outer heliosphere of the Sun, and making important astrophysical observations from its unmatched vantage point in distant regions of the solar system.
The Uranus results are being presented this week at the 56th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences, in Boise, Idaho.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for over three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, Colorado, also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.
The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Southwest Research Institute, based in San Antonio and Boulder, Colorado, directs the mission via Principal Investigator Alan Stern and leads the science team, payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons is part of NASA’s New Frontiers program, managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Facebook logo @NASAHubble @NASAHubble Instagram logo @NASAHubble Media Contacts:
Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
Hannah Braun, Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD
Science Contacts:
Samantha Hasler
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
Share
Details
Last Updated Oct 09, 2024 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
Astrophysics Division Goddard Space Flight Center Hubble Space Telescope New Horizons Planetary Science Planetary Science Division Planets The Solar System Uranus Keep Exploring Explore More
Hubble Space Telescope
Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.
New Horizons
New Horizons was the first spacecraft to explore Pluto and its five moons up close and, later, made the first…
Studying the Outer Planets and Moons
Hubble Online Activities
View the full article
-
By NASA
Learn Home How Do Astronauts Get in… Astronauts Overview Learning Resources Science Activation Teams SME Map Opportunities More Science Activation Stories Citizen Science 2 min read
How Do Astronauts Get in Shape? – New “Ask SME” from NASA eClips
The NASA Science Activation program’s NASA eClips project, led by the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA), aims to increase Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics (STEM) literacy and inspire the next generation of engineers and scientists by providing effective web-based, standards-aligned, in-school and out-of-school learning and teaching resources through the lens of NASA.
As a part of this work, NASA eClips professionally produces the Ask SME: Close-up With a NASA Subject Matter Expert video series to capture a glimpse of NASA SME’s personal interests and career journeys. Each video can be used to spark student interest and broaden their ideas of who the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) workforce might include (everyone!) and the kinds of work they do.
On September 19, 2024, NASA eClips released the most recent video in the Ask SME series, featuring Corey Twine from NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Twine is an Astronaut Strength and Conditioning Specialist who works with astronauts to keep them physically fit for work on Earth and while they are in space. He shares insights about how he helps the astronauts and what inspired him to pursue this career.
Watch the Video
NASA eClips is supported by NASA under cooperative agreement award number NNX16AB91A and is part of NASA’s Science Activation Portfolio. Learn more about how Science Activation connects NASA science experts, real content, and experiences with community leaders to do science in ways that activate minds and promote deeper understanding of our world and beyond: https://science.nasa.gov/learn
SME Corey Twine, Astronaut Strength & Conditioning Specialist Share
Details
Last Updated Oct 09, 2024 Editor NASA Science Editorial Team Location Johnson Space Center Related Terms
Astronauts For Educators People of Johnson Science Activation Explore More
3 min read Connected Learning Ecosystems: Educators Learning and Growing Together
Article
23 hours ago
3 min read GLOBE Eclipse and Civil Air Patrol: An Astronomical Collaboration
Article
2 days ago
5 min read Science Activation’s PLACES Team Facilitates Third Professional Learning Institute
Article
5 days ago
Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA
James Webb Space Telescope
Webb is the premier observatory of the next decade, serving thousands of astronomers worldwide. It studies every phase in the…
Perseverance Rover
This rover and its aerial sidekick were assigned to study the geology of Mars and seek signs of ancient microbial…
Parker Solar Probe
On a mission to “touch the Sun,” NASA’s Parker Solar Probe became the first spacecraft to fly through the corona…
Juno
NASA’s Juno spacecraft entered orbit around Jupiter in 2016, the first explorer to peer below the planet’s dense clouds to…
View the full article
-
By NASA
3 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
This video shows IPEx in the digital simulation environment.Credit: Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben/Beverly Jensen Space is hard, but it’s not all hardware.
The new Lunar Autonomy Challenge invites teams of students from U.S. colleges and universities to test their software development skills. Working entirely in virtual simulations of the Moon’s surface, teams will develop an autonomous agent using software that can accomplish pre-defined tasks without help from humans. These agents will be used to navigate a digital twin of NASA’s ISRU Pilot Excavator (IPEx) and map specified locations in the digital environment. The IPEx is an autonomous mobility robot engineered to efficiently collect and transport lunar regolith, the loose rocky material on the Moon’s surface.
Autonomous systems allow spacecraft, rovers, and robots to operate without relying on constant contact with astronauts or mission control. Before hardware is trusted to operate independently on location, which for Artemis missions includes the Moon, it must be tested virtually. High-fidelity virtual simulations allow NASA to anticipate and improve how systems, both software and hardware, will function in the physical world. Testing in virtual simulations also allows technologists to explore different mission scenarios, observe potential outcomes, and reduce risks.
In the Lunar Autonomy Challenge, students will develop their knowledge of autonomous systems by working with the same simulation tools created in-house by Caterpillar Inc. of Irving, Texas, over decades of research and development. Teams will need to utilize the IPEx digital twin’s cameras and orientation sensors to accurately map surface elevation and identify obstacles. Like with real lunar missions, teams must also manage their energy usage and consider the Moon’s harsh terrain and low-light conditions. Through the competition, participants will learn more about autonomous robotic operation, surface mapping, localization, orientation, path planning, and hazard detection.
Eligibility
Teams must be comprised of at least four undergraduate and/or graduate students and a faculty advisor at a U.S. college or university.
Challenge Timeline & Structure
The challenge will take place between November 2024 and May 2025 and will include both a qualifying round and a final round. Interested teams must apply by Thursday, Nov. 7.
Round 1: Selected teams will develop and train their agent using provided virtual environments. Teams will have three opportunities to submit their agent to run in a qualification environment. For each submission, their agent will be scored based on performance.
The top scoring teams will be invited to continue. Round 2: Teams will work to further refine the agents. Teams will have multiple opportunities in total to submit their agents to the competition environment. The top three teams will be named challenge winners. Challenge Guidelines
Interested teams should carefully review the Challenge Guidelines and the Lunar Autonomy Challenge site for more details, including proposal requirements, FAQs, and additional technical guidance.
Prizes
The top three highest-scoring teams on the leaderboard in the finals will be awarded cash prizes:
First Place: $10,000
Second Place: $5,000
Third Place: $3,000
Application Submissions
Applications must be submitted to NASA STEM Gateway by Nov. 7, 2024.
Learn more about the challenge: https://lunar-autonomy-challenge.jhuapl.edu
The Lunar Autonomy Challenge is a collaboration between NASA, The Johns Hopkins University (JHU) Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), Caterpillar Inc., and Embodied AI. APL is managing the challenge for NASA.
NASA’s ISRU Pilot Excavator (IPEx) during a flight-like demonstration at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center’s Swamp Works testing facility. Credit: NASA Authored by: Stephanie Yeldell, Education Integration Lead
Space Technology Mission Directorate
NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC
Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA
Space Technology Mission Directorate
NASA’s Lunar Surface Innovation Initiative
ISRU Pilot Excavator
Get Involved
View the full article
-
By NASA
A preview image of the Minecraft world inspired by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Credit: Minecraft NASA invites gamers, educators, and students to grab their pickaxe and check out its latest collaboration with Minecraft exploring a new world inspired by the agency’s James Webb Space Telescope. The partnership allows creators to experience NASA’s discoveries with interactive modules on star formation, planets, and galaxy types, modeled using real Webb images.
The James Webb Space Telescope Challenges were developed to inspire the next generation of scientists, engineers, and technicians. Through the game, students can immerse themselves in the science and technology behind Webb, deepening their understanding of NASA’s mission and sparking an interest in the real-world applications of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).
“We’re thrilled to bring the wonders and science of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope into the hands of the Artemis Generation through this exciting Minecraft collaboration,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy. “This collaboration is yet another way anyone can join NASA as we explore the secrets of the universe and solve the world’s most complex problems, making space exploration engaging for learners of all ages.”
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope launched to space Dec. 25, 2021, and has gone on to make detailed observations of the planets within our own solar system, peer into the atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars outside our solar system, and capture images and spectra of the most distant galaxies ever detected.
“NASA’s collaboration with Minecraft allows players to experience the excitement of one of the most ambitious space missions ever,” said Mike Davis, Webb project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “No matter where Webb looks, it sees something intriguing, setting the stage for amazing discoveries yet to come. As people explore the Minecraft world of Webb, we hope they will be inspired to carry that interest further and maybe someday help NASA build future space telescopes.”
Webb is the world’s premier space science observatory. The space telescope is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement provides unique opportunities for students to learn about STEM. In 2023, NASA partnered with Minecraft on an Artemis Challenge where users could build and launch a rocket, guide their Orion spacecraft, and even establish a lunar base alongside their team. Through collaboration with partners such as Microsoft, NASA can share the excitement of space exploration with even more students who are part of the Artemis Generation.
Learn more about how NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement is inspiring the next generation of explorers at:
https://www.nasa.gov/stem
View the full article
-
By NASA
5 min read
NASA: New Insights into How Mars Became Uninhabitable
NASA’s Curiosity rover, currently exploring Gale crater on Mars, is providing new details about how the ancient Martian climate went from potentially suitable for life – with evidence for widespread liquid water on the surface – to a surface that is inhospitable to terrestrial life as we know it.
This is an artist’s concept of an early Mars with liquid water (blue areas) on its surface. Ancient regions on Mars bear signs of abundant water – such as features resembling valleys and deltas, and minerals that only form in the presence of liquid water. Scientists think that billions of years ago, the atmosphere of Mars was much denser and warm enough to form rivers, lakes, and perhaps even oceans of water. As the planet cooled and lost its global magnetic field, the solar wind and solar storms eroded away to space a significant amount of the planet’s atmosphere, turning Mars into the cold, arid desert we see today. NASA/MAVEN/The Lunar and Planetary Institute Although the surface of Mars is frigid and hostile to life today, NASA’s robotic explorers at Mars are searching for clues as to whether it could have supported life in the distant past. Researchers used instruments on board Curiosity to measure the isotopic composition of carbon-rich minerals (carbonates) found in Gale crater and discovered new insights into how the Red Planet’s ancient climate transformed.
“The isotope values of these carbonates point toward extreme amounts of evaporation, suggesting that these carbonates likely formed in a climate that could only support transient liquid water,” said David Burtt of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of a paper describing this research published October 7 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Our samples are not consistent with an ancient environment with life (biosphere) on the surface of Mars, although this does not rule out the possibility of an underground biosphere or a surface biosphere that began and ended before these carbonates formed.”
Isotopes are versions of an element with different masses. As water evaporated, light versions of carbon and oxygen were more likely to escape into the atmosphere, while the heavy versions were left behind more often, accumulating into higher abundances and, in this case, eventually being incorporated into the carbonate rocks. Scientists are interested in carbonates because of their proven ability to act as climate records. These minerals can retain signatures of the environments in which they formed, including the temperature and acidity of the water, and the composition of the water and the atmosphere.
The paper proposes two formation mechanisms for carbonates found at Gale. In the first scenario, carbonates are formed through a series of wet-dry cycles within Gale crater. In the second, carbonates are formed in very salty water under cold, ice-forming (cryogenic) conditions in Gale crater.
“These formation mechanisms represent two different climate regimes that may present different habitability scenarios,” said Jennifer Stern of NASA Goddard, a co-author of the paper. “Wet-dry cycling would indicate alternation between more-habitable and less-habitable environments, while cryogenic temperatures in the mid-latitudes of Mars would indicate a less-habitable environment where most water is locked up in ice and not available for chemistry or biology, and what is there is extremely salty and unpleasant for life.”
These climate scenarios for ancient Mars have been proposed before, based on the presence of certain minerals, global-scale modeling, and the identification of rock formations. This result is the first to add isotopic evidence from rock samples in support of the scenarios.
The heavy isotope values in the Martian carbonates are significantly higher than what’s seen on Earth for carbonate minerals and are the heaviest carbon and oxygen isotope values recorded for any Mars materials. In fact, according to the team, both the wet-dry and the cold-salty climates are required to form carbonates that are so enriched in heavy carbon and oxygen.
“The fact that these carbon and oxygen isotope values are higher than anything else measured on Earth or Mars points towards a process (or processes) being taken to an extreme,” said Burtt. “While evaporation can cause significant oxygen isotope changes on Earth, the changes measured in this study were two to three times larger. This means two things: 1) there was an extreme degree of evaporation driving these isotope values to be so heavy, and 2) these heavier values were preserved so any processes that would create lighter isotope values must have been significantly smaller in magnitude.”
This discovery was made using the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) and Tunable Laser Spectrometer (TLS) instruments aboard the Curiosity rover. SAM heats samples up to nearly 1,652 degrees Fahrenheit (almost 900°C) and then the TLS is used to analyze the gases that are produced during that heating phase.
Funding for this work came from NASA’s Mars Exploration Program through the Mars Science Laboratory project. Curiosity was built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the mission on behalf of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. NASA Goddard built the SAM instrument, which is a miniaturized scientific laboratory that includes three different instruments for analyzing chemistry, including the TLS, plus mechanisms for handling and processing samples.
By William Steigerwald
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland
Media contacts:
Nancy Neal-Jones/Andrew Good
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md./Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
301-286-0039/818-393-2433
nancy.n.jones@nasa.gov / andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
Share
Details
Last Updated Oct 07, 2024 Editor wasteigerwald Contact wasteigerwald william.a.steigerwald@nasa.gov Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
Astrobiology Mars Uncategorized Explore More
3 min read 2024 ASGSR Art Competition!
Article
5 days ago
6 min read Celebrating 10 Years at Mars with NASA’s MAVEN Mission
A decade ago, on Sept. 21, 2014, NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmospheric and Volatile EvolutioN) spacecraft…
Article
2 weeks ago
6 min read NASA’s Hubble, MAVEN Help Solve the Mystery of Mars’ Escaping Water
Article
1 month ago
View the full article
-
-
Check out these Videos
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.