Friendly Rivalry Pits U.S. vs. German Astronauts on Space Station
NASA's Reid Wiseman and Steve Swanson and the European Space Agency's Astronaut Alexander Gerst, who's from Germany, are cheering on their home countries' World Cup 2014 teams, but will the post-goal celebrations be as uplifting as those on Earth?
In this video, the crew shows off their own World Cup moves in an "Out Of This World Cup" match. Zero-gravity offers a unique environment to explore new ways to enjoy and celebrate the world's most popular sport.
Video Credit: NASA
#worldcup #usmnt #worldcup2014 #usavsgermany #soccer #football
The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's "Operation Moonwatch" spawned a culture of amateur skywatchers in the 1950s. we have a history of engaging "citizen scientists" to stimulate public participation in observing phenomena, conducting scientific research or collecting data. In that spirit, on June 18, 2013, we announced the Asteroid Grand Challenge to find all asteroid threats to human population and know what to do about them. We're seeking new ways to get the global public involved in protecting the planet from asteroid threats.
NASA's Near Earth Object Observation Program estimates that less than 10 percent of objects smaller than 300 meters in diameter and less than 1 percent of objects smaller than 100 meters in diameter have been discovered, and it will take a global effort with innovative solutions to accelerate the completion of the survey of potentially hazardous asteroids.
NASA engineers recently went on an auricle ride as a 5-percent scale model of the Space Launch System (SLS), including solid rocket motors, was fired -- giving an "earful" of information about how low- and high-frequency sound waves will affect the rocket on the launch pad. The data collected from the tests will be used to help direct and verify the design of the rocket's sound suppression system. When completed, SLS will be capable of taking a crew and cargo on deep space missions, including to an asteroid and eventually Mars.
Spurting Plasma: A stream of plasma burst out from the sun, but since it lacked enough force to break away, most of it fell back into the sun (May 27, 2014). The video, seen in a combination of two wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light, covers a little over two hours. This eruption was minor and such events occur almost every day on the sun and suggest the kind of dynamic activity being driven by powerful magnetic forces near the sun's surface.
In honor of Julia Collins's historic 20-win run on #Jeopardy, winning more money than any other female who has appeared on the show, we're throwing back this Thursday to #AlexTrebek's 'clue' on NASA's investment in America's future.
Video credit: NASA
#tbt #321TechOff #nasa #space #investment #psa #alextrebek #throwbackthursday
As fans around the world tune in to World Cup 2014, a few fans out of this world will be watching, too. United States astronauts Reid Wiseman and Steve Swanson and German astronaut Alexander Gerst will be cheering on their teams from some 230 miles above Earth aboard the International Space Station.
The crew sent down a special message to wish good luck to all the players and teams as they compete in World Cup 2014 in Brazil from June 12 until the final match July 13. The astronauts have trained for years to work together as a unified crew, but the U.S. astronauts and their German crewmate are feeling a little friendly competition: their home countries will play against each other for a chance to advance out of Group G of the World Cup matches. USA and Germany face off on June 26 at Arena Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil.
Reid Wiseman, of NASA, and Alexander Gerst, of the European Space Agency, arrived at the space station on May 28 as part of the Expedition 40/41 crew and are scheduled to spend the next several months living and working in space until they return to Earth in November 2014. Steven Swanson arrived as part of the Expedition 39/40 crew on March 25 and is expected to return home in September 2014.
Video credit: NASA
#worldcup #iss #nasa #space #dlr #exp40
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has imaged the planet Mercury passing in front of the sun, visible as a faint darkening that moves across the face of the sun.
This is the first transit of the sun by a planet observed from any planet other than Earth, and also the first imaging of Mercury from Mars. Mercury fills only about one-sixth of one pixel as seen from such great distance, so the darkening does not have a distinct shape, but its position follows Mercury's expected path based on orbital calculations.
The observations were made on June 3, 2014, from Curiosity's position inside Gale Crater on Mars. In addition to showing the Mercury transit, the same Mastcam frames show two sunspots approximately the size of Earth. The sunspots move only at the pace of the sun's rotation, much slower than the movement of Mercury.
Many viewers on Earth observed a Venus transit in June 2012, the last visible from Earth this century. The next Mercury transit visible from Earth will be May 9, 2016. Mercury and Venus transits are visible more often from Mars than from Earth, and Mars also offers a vantage point for seeing Earth transits. The next of each type visible from Mars will be Mercury in April 2015, Venus in August 2030 and Earth in November 2084.
This animated blink comparison shows five versions of observations that NASA's Curiosity made about one hour apart while Mercury was passing in front of the sun on June 3, 2014. Two sunspots, each about the diameter of Earth, also appear, moving much less than Mercury during the hour.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Texas A&M
#nasa #mars #curiosity #marscuriosity #solarsystem #space #mercury #sun #solar
With the #BelmontStakes this Saturday and the #NBAFinals heating up, let's Throwback Thursday to one of the tallest and one of the shortest professional athletes finding a middle ground on the topic of space technology. They mention scratch-resistant lenses, a popular NASA spinoff. It's a technology, originally developed to meet NASA mission needs, that has been transferred to the public and now provides benefits for the nation and world as a commercial product or service.
Video credit: NASA
#tbt #321TechOff #BelmontStakes #NBAFinals #throwbackthursday #vintage #history #nasahistory @kaj33
Rosetta's Comet Comes Alive! The target of ESA’s Rosetta mission has started to reveal its true personality as a comet, its dusty veil clearly developing over the past six weeks. A new sequence of images of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko was taken between March 24 and May 4, as the gap between craft and comet closed from around 3.1 million miles (5 million km) to 1.2 million miles (2 million km). By the end of the sequence, the comet’s coma extends about 800 miles (1,300 km) into space. The nucleus is roughly 2.5 miles (4 km) across.
Dust off before the drill down. Our Curiosity rover prepares to drill this sandstone. Follow @NASAJPL for more great Mars images!
This two-step animation shows before and after views of a patch of sandstone scrubbed with the Dust Removal Tool, a wire-bristle brush, on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover. Both images were taken April 26, 2014, by the Mars Hand Lens Imager on Curiosity's arm. The target rock is called "Windjana." Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Happy Valentine's Day! Here's more #NASALove -- We're always over the moon for you with our Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft. Earlier this month, LADEE successfully downlinked images of the moon and stars taken by onboard camera systems, known as star trackers. This is the first time the LADEE team commanded the spacecraft to send these pictures back to Earth.
The main job of a star tracker is to snap images of the surrounding star field so that the spacecraft can internally calculate its orientation in space. It completes this task many times per minute. The accuracy of each of LADEE's instruments' measurements depends on the star tracker calculating the precise orientation of the spacecraft. Given the critical nature of its assignment, a star tracker doesn't use ordinary cameras. Star trackers' lenses have a wide-angle field of view in order to capture the night sky in a single frame.
The images shown here were acquired on Feb. 8, 2014, around 23:45 UTC, while LADEE was carrying out atmospheric measurements. The series of five images were taken at one-minute intervals, and caught features in the northern western hemisphere of the moon. LADEE was traveling approximately 60 miles (100 km) per minute along its orbit. All images were taken during lunar night, but with Earthshine illuminating the surface.
Image credit: NASA
#nasa #moon #ladee #space #firstpics #moonpics #moonpix #lunar
A new NASA video of NOAA's GOES satellite imagery shows three days of movement of the massive winter storm that stretches from the southern U.S. to the northeast.
Visible and infrared imagery from NOAA's GOES-East or GOES-13 satellite from Feb. 10 at 1815 UTC/1:15 p.m. EST to Feb. 12 to 1845 UTC/1:45 p.m. EST were compiled into a video made by NASA/NOAA's GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
In the video, viewers can see the development and movement of the clouds associated with the progression of the frontal system and related low pressure areas that make up the massive storm. The video also shows the snow covered ground over the Great Lakes region and Ohio Valley that stretches to northern New England. The clouds and fallen snow data from NOAA's GOES-East satellite were overlaid on a true-color image of land and ocean created by data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites.
On February 12 at 10 a.m. EST, @NOAA's National Weather Service or NWS continued to issue watches and warnings from Texas to New England. Specifically, NWS cited Winter Storm Warnings and Winter Weather Advisories were in effect from eastern Texas eastward across the interior section of southeastern U.S. states and across much of the eastern seaboard including the Appalachians. Winter storm watches are in effect for portions of northern New England as well as along the western slopes of northern and central Appalachians. For updates on local forecasts, watches and warnings, visit NOAA's www.weather.gov webpage.
Movie of Curiosity's View Backwards While Crossing Dune - The series of nine images making up this animation were taken by the rear Hazard-Avoidance Camera (rear Hazcam) on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover as the rover drove over a dune spanning "Dingo Gap" on Mars. The Hazcam, mounted low on the vehicle's chassis, provides a wide-angle view. Curiosity made this 23-foot (7 meter) drive during the 535th Martian day, or sol, of its work on Mars (Feb. 6, 2014). At the start of the drive, the rover's right-front wheel was already at the crest of the 3-foot-tall (1-meter-tall) dune, with the rover still pointed uphill. By the last three images in the series, the rover was headed downhill.
The light-toned dome on the right side of the horizon is part of Mount Sharp. This drive was westward. The rover's long-term destination on the lower slope of Mount Sharp is still farther west and south from the rover's current location. Dingo Gap provided an entryway into a valley to the west. The valley appealed to the rover team as a driving route because its terrain includes fewer sharp rocks than alternative routes considered.
Early Wednesday morning (Jan. 1, 2014), while New Year's 2014 celebrations were still underway in the United States, the Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, Ariz., collected a single track of observations with an immediate follow-up on what was possibly a very small asteroid -- 7 to 10 feet (2 to 3 meters) in size -- on a potential impact trajectory with Earth.
Designated 2014 AA, which would make it the first asteroid discovery of 2014, the track of observations on the object allowed only an uncertain orbit to be calculated. However, if this was a very small asteroid on an Earth-impacting trajectory, it most likely entered Earth's atmosphere sometime between 11 a.m. PST (2 p.m. EST) Wednesday and 6 a.m. PST (9 a.m. EST) Thursday.
Using the only available observations, three independent projections of the possible orbit by the independent orbit analyst Bill Gray, of the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., and Steve Chesley, of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., are in agreement that 2014 AA would hit Earth's atmosphere. According to Chesley, the potential impact locations are widely distributed because of the orbit uncertainty, falling along an arc extending from Central America to East Africa. The most likely impact location of the object was just off the coast of West Africa at about 6 p.m. PST (9 p.m. EST) Jan. 1.
It is unlikely asteroid 2014 AA would have survived atmospheric entry intact, as it was comparable in size to asteroid 2008 TC3, which was about 7 to 10 feet (2 to 3 meters) in size. 2008 TC3 completely broke up over northern Sudan in October 2008. Asteroid 2008 TC3 is the only other example of an object discovered just prior to hitting Earth. So far, there have been a few weak signals collected from infrasound stations in that region of the world that are being analyzed to see if they could be correlated to the atmospheric entry of 2014 AA.
Image Credit: CSS/LPL/UA
#asteroid #neo #nasa #space #2014
#AGU13 - What is the impact of Earth's seven plus billion people on biodiversity? It's a complex puzzle, as biodiversity continuously shapes the planet's land and oceans. Allison Leidner of NASA Headquarters demonstrated how space based observations reveal Earth as a system, presenting at NASA's Hyperwall this week at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco.
In addition to coordinating activities in NASA's biodiversity program, Leidner helps coordinate NASA's involvement in the National Climate Assessment. "I'm here at AGU for both of those reasons, because AGU is a really important conference for understanding the latest advances in climate change science, and also understanding the impacts and how we assess those changes to help inform our decisions," Leidner said.
The annual fall meeting of the AGU is a chance for more than 22,000 scientists, educators, and students to present their research, broaden their knowledge base and embrace the excitement of science. In these 15-second videos, scientists talk about the NASA science projects they are presented at the conference that you may not have seen.
#nasa #biodiversity #earth #agu #video #science #weather #climate #hyperwall #oceans
#AGU13 -This is not Yellowstone National Park, or anywhere on Earth for that matter – these plumes erupt from the frigid, icy surface of the Jovian moon Europa. Observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope provide the first strong evidence of water vapor plumes ejected off the moon's surface.
Michelle Thaller of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., described the study, and other new findings from planetary science, to a sizeable crowd gathered around NASA's Hyperwall at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco. Lorenz Roth of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio lead the plume research, which was published Dec. 12 in the online issue of Science Express and presented at an AGU media briefing.
The annual fall meeting of the AGU is a chance for more than 22,000 scientists, educators, and students to present their research, broaden their knowledge base and embrace the excitement of science. In these 15-second videos, scientists talk about the NASA science projects they are presented at the conference that you may not have seen.
#nasa #moon #earth #agu #video #science #jupiter #climate #europa #jovian #hubble #hyperwall #planets #solarsystem
#AGU13 - Deep in the swamplands of southern Louisiana, a sinkhole gobbled up an entire 25 acres over the span of about one year and caused the evacuation of a nearby town. While disasters like this might come as a shock to the alligators in the marsh, events like this are becoming possible to forecast, according to Cathleen Jones of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Jones uses data from radar instruments on NASA aircraft, flown repeatedly over a site, to detect change in land surfaces. She was surprised to find that the technique can even detect some sinkholes before they collapse, and described the specifics of her findings this week at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco.
The annual fall meeting of the AGU is a chance for more than 22,000 scientists, educators, and students to present their research, broaden their knowledge base and embrace the excitement of science. In these 15-second videos, scientists talk about the NASA science projects they are presented at the conference that you may not have seen.
#nasa #aircraft #earth #agu #video #science #weather #climate #sinkhole
#AGU13 video - The Antarctic Peninsula is one of the fastest warming parts of the planet. There, ice shelves jut out from glaciers and into the sea, but the situation can change rapidly. In 1995 and 2002, for example, giant sections of the Larsen Ice Shelf disintegrated. When these remnants of glaciers and ice sheets float off and begin to melt, it can have implications for sea level rise. So Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., and other scientists keep close watch on the region, using ground-based instruments and satellites.
This week at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, Scambos presented a new look at the changes that occur before an ice shelf breaks apart. The research provides insight on the earliest instigators of ice shelf change.
The annual fall meeting of the AGU is a chance for more than 22,000 scientists, educators, and students to present their research, broaden their knowledge base and embrace the excitement of science. In these 15-second videos, scientists talk about the NASA science projects they are presented at the conference that you may not have seen.
#nasa #space #earth #agu #video #science #ice #weather @climate #antarctic
In Full View: Saturn's Streaming Hexagon - This colorful view from NASA's Cassini mission is the highest-resolution view of the unique six-sided jet stream at Saturn's north pole known as "the hexagon." This movie, made from images obtained by Cassini's imaging cameras, is the first to show the hexagon in color filters, and the first movie to show a complete view from the north pole down to about 70 degrees north latitude.
This movie shows a view from directly over the north pole, keeping up with the rotation of the planet so that all the motion seen on the screen is the motion of the hexagonal jet stream or the storms inside of it, without any added motion from the spinning of the planet itself. The original images were re-projected to show this polar view.
High-resolution views of the hexagon have only recently become possible because of the changing of the seasons at Saturn and changes in the Cassini spacecraft’s orbit. The north pole was dark when Cassini first arrived in July 2004. The sun really only began to illuminate the entire interior of the hexagon in August 2009, with the start of northern spring. In late 2012, Cassini began making swings over Saturn's poles, giving it better views of the hexagon.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Hampton
#nasa #space #solarsystem #saturn #cassini #filters #spacecract
Comet ISON Approaching the Sun: This movie from NASA’s STEREO spacecraft's Heliospheric Imager shows Comet ISON, Mercury, Comet Encke and Earth over a five-day period from Nov. 20 to Nov. 25, 2013. The sun sits right of the field of view of this camera. Comet ISON, which will round the sun on Nov. 28, is what's known as a sungrazing comet, due to its close approach.
A comet’s journey through the solar system is perilous and violent. A giant ejection of solar material from the sun could rip its tail off. Before it reaches Mars -- at some 230 million miles away from the sun -- the radiation of the sun begins to boil its water, the first step toward breaking apart. And, if it survives all this, the intense radiation and pressure as it flies near the surface of the sun could destroy it altogether.
Even if the comet does not survive, tracking its journey will help scientists understand what the comet is made of, how it reacts to its environment, and what this explains about the origins of the solar system. Closer to the sun, watching how the comet and its tail interact with the vast solar atmosphere can teach scientists more about the sun itself.
