Members Can Post Anonymously On This Site
NASA’s EZIE Launching to Study Magnetic Fingerprints of Earth’s Aurora
-
Similar Topics
-
By NASA
Inside a laboratory in the Space Systems Processing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a payload implementation team member harvests ‘Outredgeous’ romaine lettuce growing in the Advanced Plant Habitat ground unit on Thursday, April 24, 2025. The harvest is part of the ground control work supporting Plant Habitat-07, which launched to the International Space Station aboard NASA’s SpaceX 31st commercial resupply services mission.
The experiment focuses on studying how optimal and suboptimal moisture conditions affect plant growth, nutrient content, and the plant microbiome in microgravity. Research like this continues NASA’s efforts to grow food that is not only safe but also nutritious for astronauts living and working in the harsh environment of space.
The ‘Outredgeous’ romaine lettuce variety was first grown aboard the space station in 2014, and Plant Habitat-07 builds on that legacy, using the station’s Advanced Plant Habitat to expand understanding of how plants adapt to spaceflight conditions. Findings from this work will support future long-duration missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, and could also lead to agricultural advances here on Earth.
Image credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett
View the full article
-
By NASA
5 Min Read Planetary Alignment Provides NASA Rare Opportunity to Study Uranus
Artist's illustration showing a distant star going out of sight as it is eclipsed by Uranus – an event known as a planetary stellar occultation. Credits: NASA/Advanced Concepts Laboratory When a planet’s orbit brings it between Earth and a distant star, it’s more than just a cosmic game of hide and seek. It’s an opportunity for NASA to improve its understanding of that planet’s atmosphere and rings. Planetary scientists call it a stellar occultation and that’s exactly what happened with Uranus on April 7.
Observing the alignment allows NASA scientists to measure the temperatures and composition of Uranus’ stratosphere – the middle layer of a planet’s atmosphere – and determine how it has changed over the last 30 years since Uranus’ last significant occultation.
To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video
This rendering demonstrates what is happening during a stellar occultation and illustrates an example of the light curve data graph recorded by scientists that enables them to gather atmospheric measurements, like temperature and pressure, from Uranus as the amount of starlight changes when the planet eclipses the star.NASA/Advanced Concepts Laboratory “Uranus passed in front of a star that is about 400 light years from Earth,” said William Saunders, planetary scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and science principal investigator and analysis lead, for what NASA’s team calls the Uranus Stellar Occultation Campaign 2025. “As Uranus began to occult the star, the planet’s atmosphere refracted the starlight, causing the star to appear to gradually dim before being blocked completely. The reverse happened at the end of the occultation, making what we call a light curve. By observing the occultation from many large telescopes, we are able to measure the light curve and determine Uranus’ atmospheric properties at many altitude layers.”
We are able to measure the light curve and determine Uranus' atmospheric properties at many altitude layers.
William Saunders
Planetary Scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center
This data mainly consists of temperature, density, and pressure of the stratosphere. Analyzing the data will help researchers understand how the middle atmosphere of Uranus works and could help enable future Uranus exploration efforts.
To observe the rare event, which lasted about an hour and was only visible from Western North America, planetary scientists at NASA Langley led an international team of over 30 astronomers using 18 professional observatories.
Kunio Sayanagi, NASA’s principal investigator for the Uranus Stellar Occultation Campaign 2025, meeting virtually with partners and observing data from the Flight Mission Support Center at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia during Uranus’ stellar occultation event on April 7, 2025.NASA/Dave MacDonnell “This was the first time we have collaborated on this scale for an occultation,” said Saunders. “I am extremely grateful to each member of the team and each observatory for taking part in this extraordinary event. NASA will use the observations of Uranus to determine how energy moves around the atmosphere and what causes the upper layers to be inexplicably hot. Others will use the data to measure Uranus’ rings, its atmospheric turbulence, and its precise orbit around the Sun.”
Knowing the location and orbit of Uranus is not as simple as it sounds. In 1986, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft became the first and only spacecraft to fly past the planet – 10 years before the last bright stellar occultation occured in 1996. And, Uranus’ exact position in space is only accurate to within about 100 miles, which makes analyzing this new atmospheric data crucial to future NASA exploration of the ice giant.
These investigations were possible because the large number of partners provided many unique views of the stellar occultation from many different instruments.
NASA planetary scientist William Saunders and Texas A&M University research assistant Erika Cook in the control room of the McDonald Observatory’s Otto Struve Telescope in Jeff Davis County, Texas, during the Uranus stellar occultation on April 7, 2025.Joshua Santana Emma Dahl, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech in Pasadena, California, assisted in gathering observations from NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii – an observatory first built to support NASA’s Voyager missions.
“As scientists, we do our best work when we collaborate. This was a team effort between NASA scientists, academic researchers, and amateur astronomers,” said Dahl. “The atmospheres of the gas and ice giant planets [Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune] are exceptional atmospheric laboratories because they don’t have solid surfaces. This allows us to study cloud formation, storms, and wind patterns without the extra variables and effects a surface produces, which can complicate simulations very quickly.”
On November 12, 2024, NASA Langley researchers and collaborators were able to do a test run to prepare for the April occultation. Langley coordinated two telescopes in Japan and one in Thailand to observe a dimmer Uranus stellar occultation only visible from Asia. As a result, these observers learned how to calibrate their instruments to observe stellar occultations, and NASA was able to test its theory that multiple observatories working together could capture Uranus’ big event in April.
Researchers from the Paris Observatory and Space Science Institute, in contact with NASA, also coordinated observations of the November 2024 occultation from two telescopes in India. These observations of Uranus and its rings allowed the researchers, who were also members of the April 7 occultation team, to improve the predictions about the timing on April 7 down to the second and also improved modeling to update Uranus’ expected location during the occultation by 125 miles.
This image of Uranus from NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope exquisitely captures Uranus’s seasonal north polar cap and dim inner and outer rings. This Webb image also shows 9 of the planet’s 27 moons – clockwise starting at 2 o’clock, they are: Rosalind, Puck, Belinda, Desdemona, Cressida, Bianca, Portia, Juliet, and Perdita.NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI Uranus is almost 2 billion miles away from Earth and has an atmosphere composed of primarily hydrogen and helium. It does not have a solid surface, but rather a soft surface made of water, ammonia, and methane. It’s called an ice giant because its interior contains an abundance of these swirling fluids that have relatively low freezing points. And, while Saturn is the most well-known planet for having rings, Uranus has 13 known rings composed of ice and dust.
Over the next six years, Uranus will occult several dimmer stars. NASA hopes to gather airborne and possibly space-based measurements of the next bright Uranus occultation in 2031, which will be of an even brighter star than the one observed in April.
For more information on NASA’s Uranus Stellar Occultation Campaign 2025:
https://science.larc.nasa.gov/URANUS2025
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
Charles Hatfield
Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia
757-262-8289
charles.g.hatfield@nasa.gov
About the Author
Charles G. Hatfield
Science Public Affairs Officer, NASA Langley Research Center
Share
Details
Last Updated Apr 22, 2025 Related Terms
General Ice Giants Langley Research Center Planetary Science Division Uranus Explore More
4 min read NASA Tests Ultralight Antennas to Benefit Future National Airspace
Article 7 hours ago 3 min read Celebrating Earth as Only NASA Can
Article 1 day ago 3 min read NASA Studies Wind Effects and Aircraft Tracking with Joby Aircraft
Article 5 days ago Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA
Missions
Humans in Space
Climate Change
Solar System
View the full article
-
By NASA
NASA’s SpaceX 32nd commercial resupply services mission, scheduled to lift off from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in April, is heading to the International Space Station with experiments that include research on whether plant DNA responses in space correlate to human aging and disease, and measuring the precise effects of gravity on time.
Discover more details about the two experiments’ potential impacts on space exploration and how they can enhance life on Earth:
“Second Guessing” Time in Space
As outlined in Einstein’s general theory of relativity, how we experience the passage of time is influenced by gravity. However, there is strong evidence to believe this theory may not be complete and that there are unknown forces at play. These new physics effects may manifest themselves in small deviations from Einstein’s prediction.
The ACES (Atomic Clock Ensemble in Space) investigation is an ESA (European Space Agency) mission that aims to help answer fundamental physics questions. By comparing a highly precise atomic clock in space with numerous ground atomic clocks around the world, ACES could take global time synchronization and clock comparison experiments to new heights.
Sponsored by NASA, United States scientists are participating in the mission in various ways, including contributing ground station reference clocks. Scheduled to collect data for 30 months, this vast network of precise clocks is expected to provide fresh insights into the exact relationship between gravity and time, set new limits for unknown forces, and improve global time synchronization.
In addition to investigating the laws of physics, ACES will enable new terrestrial applications such as relativistic geodesy, which involves measuring Earth’s shape and gravitational field with extreme precision. These advancements are critical to space navigation, satellite operations, and GPS systems. For example, without understanding the time fluctuations between Earth and medium Earth orbit, GPS would be progressively less accurate.
A robotic arm will attach ACES to the Columbus Laboratory module aboard the International Space Station. Image courtesy of ESA Probing Plants for Properties to Protect DNA
The APEX-12 (Advanced Plant EXperiment-12) investigation will test the hypothesis that induction of telomerase activity in space protects plant DNA molecules from damage elicited by cellular stress evoked by the combined spaceflight stressors experienced by seedlings grown aboard the space station. It is expected that results will lead to a better understanding of differences between human and plant telomere behavior in space.
Data on telomerase activity in plants could be leveraged not only to develop therapies for age-related diseases in space and on Earth, but also for ensuring food crops are more resilient to spaceflight stress.
Telomeres and telomerase influence cell division and cell death, two processes crucial to understanding aging in humans. Telomeres are the protective end caps of chromosomes. Each time a cell divides, the telomeres shorten slightly, essentially acting as a biological clock for cell aging. Conversely, telomerase is an enzyme that adds nucleotide sequences to the ends of telomeres, lengthening them and counteracting their shortening.
In humans, telomere shortening is linked to various age-related conditions, such as cardiovascular diseases and certain cancers. In astronauts, studies have shown that spaceflight leads to changes in telomere length, with a notable lengthening observed. This phenomenon carries potential implications for astronaut health outcomes. By contrast, plant telomere length did not change during spaceflight, despite a dramatic increase in telomerase activity.
A microscopic image of plant telomeres taken under a fluorescent microscope. The chromosomes are highlighted in blue. The telomeres are highlighted in yellow. Image courtesy of Texas A&M University How this benefits space exploration: Experiments aboard NASA’s SpaceX CRS-32 mission is twofold. One, they have the potential to significantly enhance precision timekeeping, which is necessary to improve space navigation and communication. Two, they can provide insights into how plants adapt to protect DNA molecules from cellular stress caused by environmental factors experienced in spaceflight, in an effort to sustain plant life in space.
How this benefits humanity: The experiments conducted on NASA’s SpaceX CRS-32 mission offer a range of potential benefits to humanity. First, improving precision timekeeping for more accurate GPS technology. Second, capturing data about how telomerase activity correlates to cellular stress in plants, which could lead to assays which better correlate telomerase activity and cellular stress and provide fundamental research to contribute to potential therapies for humans.
Learn more about the investigations:
ACES (Atomic Clock Ensemble in Space)
Atomic Clock Ensemble in Space (ACES) is a European Space Agency (ESA) mission that aims to help answer fundamental physics questions.
APEX-12 (Advanced Plant EXperiment-12)
Advanced Plant EXperiment-12 (APEX-12) will test the hypothesis that induction of telomerase, a protein complex, activity in space protects plant DNA molecules from damage elicited by cellular stress evoked by the combined spaceflight stressors experienced by seedlings grown aboard the space station.
About BPS
NASA’s Biological and Physical Sciences Division pioneers scientific discovery and enables exploration by using space environments to conduct investigations not possible on Earth. Studying biological and physical phenomenon under extreme conditions allows researchers to advance the fundamental scientific knowledge required to go farther and stay longer in space, while also benefitting life on Earth.
View the full article
-
-
By NASA
Explore This Section Webb News Latest News Latest Images Blog (offsite) Awards X (offsite – login reqd) Instagram (offsite – login reqd) Facebook (offsite- login reqd) Youtube (offsite) Overview About Who is James Webb? Fact Sheet Impacts+Benefits FAQ Science Overview and Goals Early Universe Galaxies Over Time Star Lifecycle Other Worlds Observatory Overview Launch Deployment Orbit Mirrors Sunshield Instrument: NIRCam Instrument: MIRI Instrument: NIRSpec Instrument: FGS/NIRISS Optical Telescope Element Backplane Spacecraft Bus Instrument Module Multimedia About Webb Images Images Videos What is Webb Observing? 3d Webb in 3d Solar System Podcasts Webb Image Sonifications Team International Team People Of Webb More For the Media For Scientists For Educators For Fun/Learning 5 Min Read NASA Webb Explores Effect of Strong Magnetic Fields on Star Formation
An image of the Milky Way captured by the MeerKAT radio telescope array puts the James Webb Space Telescope’s image of the Sagittarius C region in context. Full image below. Credits:
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, SARAO, Samuel Crowe (UVA), John Bally (CU), Ruben Fedriani (IAA-CSIC), Ian Heywood (Oxford) Follow-up research on a 2023 image of the Sagittarius C stellar nursery in the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, has revealed ejections from still-forming protostars and insights into the impact of strong magnetic fields on interstellar gas and the life cycle of stars.
“A big question in the Central Molecular Zone of our galaxy has been, if there is so much dense gas and cosmic dust here, and we know that stars form in such clouds, why are so few stars born here?” said astrophysicist John Bally of the University of Colorado Boulder, one of the principal investigators. “Now, for the first time, we are seeing directly that strong magnetic fields may play an important role in suppressing star formation, even at small scales.”
Detailed study of stars in this crowded, dusty region has been limited, but Webb’s advanced near-infrared instruments have allowed astronomers to see through the clouds to study young stars like never before.
“The extreme environment of the galactic center is a fascinating place to put star formation theories to the test, and the infrared capabilities of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope provide the opportunity to build on past important observations from ground-based telescopes like ALMA and MeerKAT,” said Samuel Crowe, another principal investigator on the research, a senior undergraduate at the University of Virginia and a 2025 Rhodes Scholar.
Bally and Crowe each led a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal.
Image A: Milky Way Center (MeerKAT and Webb)
An image of the Milky Way captured by the MeerKAT (formerly the Karoo Array Telescope) radio telescope array puts the James Webb Space Telescope’s image of the Sagittarius C region in context. Like a super-long exposure photograph, MeerKAT shows the bubble-like remnants of supernovas that exploded over millennia, capturing the dynamic nature of the Milky Way’s chaotic core. At the center of the MeerKAT image the region surrounding the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole blazes bright. Huge vertical filamentary structures echo those captured on a smaller scale by Webb in Sagittarius C’s blue-green hydrogen cloud. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, SARAO, Samuel Crowe (UVA), John Bally (CU), Ruben Fedriani (IAA-CSIC), Ian Heywood (Oxford) Image B: Milky Way Center (MeerKAT and Webb), Labeled
The star-forming region Sagittarius C, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, is about 200 light-years from the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*. The spectral index at the lower left shows how color was assigned to the radio data to create the image. On the negative end, there is non-thermal emission, stimulated by electrons spiraling around magnetic field lines. On the positive side, thermal emission is coming from hot, ionized plasma. For Webb, color is assigned by shifting the infrared spectrum to visible light colors. The shortest infrared wavelengths are bluer, and the longer wavelengths appear more red. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, SARAO, Samuel Crowe (UVA), John Bally (CU), Ruben Fedriani (IAA-CSIC), Ian Heywood (Oxford) Using Infrared to Reveal Forming Stars
In Sagittarius C’s brightest cluster, the researchers confirmed the tentative finding from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) that two massive stars are forming there. Along with infrared data from NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope and SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) mission, as well as the Herschel Space Observatory, they used Webb to determine that each of the massive protostars is already more than 20 times the mass of the Sun. Webb also revealed the bright outflows powered by each protostar.
Even more challenging is finding low-mass protostars, still shrouded in cocoons of cosmic dust. Researchers compared Webb’s data with ALMA’s past observations to identify five likely low-mass protostar candidates.
The team also identified 88 features that appear to be shocked hydrogen gas, where material being blasted out in jets from young stars impacts the surrounding gas cloud. Analysis of these features led to the discovery of a new star-forming cloud, distinct from the main Sagittarius C cloud, hosting at least two protostars powering their own jets.
“Outflows from forming stars in Sagittarius C have been hinted at in past observations, but this is the first time we’ve been able to confirm them in infrared light. It’s very exciting to see, because there is still a lot we don’t know about star formation, especially in the Central Molecular Zone, and it’s so important to how the universe works,” said Crowe.
Magnetic Fields and Star Formation
Webb’s 2023 image of Sagittarius C showed dozens of distinctive filaments in a region of hot hydrogen plasma surrounding the main star-forming cloud. New analysis by Bally and his team has led them to hypothesize that the filaments are shaped by magnetic fields, which have also been observed in the past by the ground-based observatories ALMA and MeerKAT (formerly the Karoo Array Telescope).
“The motion of gas swirling in the extreme tidal forces of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, can stretch and amplify the surrounding magnetic fields. Those fields, in turn, are shaping the plasma in Sagittarius C,” said Bally.
The researchers think that the magnetic forces in the galactic center may be strong enough to keep the plasma from spreading, instead confining it into the concentrated filaments seen in the Webb image. These strong magnetic fields may also resist the gravity that would typically cause dense clouds of gas and dust to collapse and forge stars, explaining Sagittarius C’s lower-than-expected star formation rate.
“This is an exciting area for future research, as the influence of strong magnetic fields, in the center of our galaxy or other galaxies, on stellar ecology has not been fully considered,” said Crowe.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb 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).
Downloads
Click any image to open a larger version.
View/Download all image products at all resolutions for this article from the Space Telescope Science Institute.
View/Download the science paper led by Bally from the The Astrophysical Journal.
View/Download the science paper led by Crowe from the The Astrophysical Journal.
Media Contacts
Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Leah Ramsay – lramsay@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
Christine Pulliam – cpulliam@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
Related Information
Read more: press releases about the center of the Milky Way
NASA’s Universe of Learning: ViewSpace Interactive image tour of the center of the Milky Way
Learn more about the Milky Way and Sagittarius Constellation
More Webb News
More Webb Images
Webb Science Themes
Webb Mission Page
Related For Kids
What Is a Nebula?
What Is a Galaxy?
What is the Webb Telescope?
SpacePlace for Kids
En Español
¿Qué es una nebulosa?
¿Qué es una galaxia?
Ciencia de la NASA
NASA en español
Space Place para niños
Keep Exploring Related Topics
James Webb Space Telescope
Webb is the premier observatory of the next decade, serving thousands of astronomers worldwide. It studies every phase in the…
Stars
Galaxies
Universe
Share
Details
Last Updated Apr 02, 2025 Editor Marty McCoy Contact Laura Betz laura.e.betz@nasa.gov Related Terms
James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Astrophysics Galaxies Galaxies, Stars, & Black Holes Goddard Space Flight Center Protostars Science & Research Stars The Milky Way The Universe 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.