“The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is the next step in the search for planets outside of our solar system, including those that could support life. The mission will find exoplanets that periodically block part of the light from their host stars, events called transits. TESS will survey 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun to search for transiting exoplanets. The mission is scheduled to launch in 2018.”
Music credit: “Prototype” and “Trial” both from Killer Tracks
“Explorer 1 showed that the United States was capable of not only launching a satellite but also carrying out scientific research in space. For four months after launch, instruments aboard Explorer 1 measured and sent back data on temperature, micrometeorites and cosmic rays, or high-energy radiation. University of Iowa physicist James Van Allen’s instrument for measuring cosmic rays, a Geiger counter, helped make the first major scientific find of the Space Age: a belt of radiation around Earth that would later be named in Van Allen’s honor.
“Explorer 1 was a beginning. It was the beginning of going beyond our sphere of life out into space,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science. “At first, quite frankly, space looked like a pretty boring place. But the instrument that Van Allen and his team built showed that space is beautiful.”
On the heels of Explorer 1’s success, the nation entered a new era of discovery on Earth and beyond that continues to this day.
In 1960, NASA launched the world’s first weather satellite, the Television and Infrared Observation Satellite (TIROS). The United States now has an extensive fleet of weather satellites operated by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that monitors storms and other natural disasters and provides critical data that helps save lives and protect critical infrastructure.
In 1972, NASA designed and launched Earth Resources Technology Satellite 1, later renamed Landsat 1, as the first spacecraft designed to monitor the planet’s land masses. Subsequent Landsat satellites, now operated by the U.S. Geological Survey, have produced over four decades of continuous data about our changing planet that have been applied to such uses as crop health monitoring, freshwater and forest management and infectious disease tracking.
NASA has a long history of using the vantage point of space to advance our understanding of our complex home planet. The Nimbus-1 satellite launched in 1964 was the first of seven such spacecraft that revolutionized Earth science. Nimbus satellites measured snow cover at the North and South poles, estimated the size of volcanic eruptions and the distribution of phytoplankton in the oceans and confirmed the existence of the annual ozone hole in Antarctica. NASA’s current fleet of more than a dozen Earth-observing missions continues to provide new insights about Earth’s interconnected systems.
Looking beyond Earth’s horizon, in 1962 NASA launched Mariner 2, the first satellite to encounter another planet as the spacecraft flew within 21,000 miles of Venus and sent back information on not only the Venusian atmosphere but also the solar wind. The space agency has since dispatched satellites to explore every planet in the solar system, in addition to the Sun and a number of moons, comets and asteroids.
NASA has also long set its gaze out into the cosmos. From 1966 to 1972, the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory series of satellites provided the first high-quality ultraviolet observations of stars at the edge of the Milky Way. The space agency has continued its groundbreaking research into the mysteries of the universe with the 2004 launch of the Swift Gamma-ray Burst Explorer, which has imaged the most luminous known galaxies in addition to detecting millions of black holes and dwarf stars.
America’s 60 years of space science has yielded profound insights and practical benefits for the nation and the world. And NASA continues to blaze new trails of discovery.”
Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/LK Ward
“Light from a supernova explosion in the nearby starburst galaxy M82 is reverberating off a huge dust cloud in interstellar space. The supernova, called SN 2014J, occurred at the upper right of M82, and is marked by an “X.” The supernova was discovered on January 21, 2014.
The inset images at top reveal an expanding shell of light from the stellar explosion sweeping through interstellar space, called a “light echo.” The images were taken 10 months to nearly two years after the violent event (November 6, 2014 to October 12, 2016). The light is bouncing off a giant dust cloud that extends 300 to 1,600 light-years from the supernova and is being reflected toward Earth.
SN 2014J is classified as a Type Ia supernova and is the closest such blast in at least four decades. A Type Ia supernova occurs in a binary star system consisting of a burned-out white dwarf and a companion star. The white dwarf explodes after the companion dumps too much material onto it. The image of M82 reveals a bright blue disk, webs of shredded clouds, and fiery-looking plumes of glowing hydrogen blasting out of its central regions.
Close encounters with its larger neighbor, the spiral galaxy M81, is compressing gas in M82 and stoking the birth of multiple star clusters. Some of these stars live for only a short time and die in cataclysmic supernova blasts, as shown by SN 2014J.
Located 11.4 million light-years away, M82 appears high in the northern spring sky in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear. It is also called the “Cigar Galaxy” because of the elliptical shape produced by the oblique tilt of its starry disk relative to our line of sight.”
Music credit: “Little Effort” by Christopher Franke [BMI]; Killer Tracks [BMI]; Killer Tracks Production Music
Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Katrina Jackson
“The more we see other planets, the more the question comes into focus: Maybe we’re the weird one? Decades of observing Earth from space has informed our search for signs of habitability and life on exoplanets and even planets in our own solar system. We’re taking a closer look at what we’ve learned about Earth – our only example of a planet with life – to our search for life the universe.”
Music credit: Curious Events by Independent Film Score – Andrew Skeet; Teapot Waltz by Benjamin James Parsons; Patisserie Pressure by Benjamin James Parsons
Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/LK Ward
“By combining the visible and infrared capabilities of the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, astronomers and visualization specialists from NASA’s Universe of Learning program have created a spectacular, three-dimensional, fly-through movie of the magnificent Orion nebula, a nearby stellar nursery. Using actual scientific data along with Hollywood techniques, a team at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, and the Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California, has produced the best and most detailed multi-wavelength visualization yet of the Orion nebula.”
Video credit: NASA/Space Telescope Science Institute
“When exoplanet scientists first spotted patterns in disks of dust and gas around young stars, they thought newly formed planets might be the cause. But a recent NASA study cautions that there may be another explanation: one that doesn’t involve planets at all. An alternative explanation suggests the dust and gas in the disk can form the patterns themselves when they interact with starlight.
When high-energy UV starlight hits dust grains, it strips away electrons. Those electrons collide with and heat nearby gas. As the gas warms, its pressure increases and it traps more dust, which in turn heats more gas. The resulting cycle, called the photoelectric instability (PeI), can work in tandem with other forces to create some of the features astronomers have previously associated with planets in debris disks.
A 2013 study suggested PeI could explain the narrow rings seen in some disks. The model also predicted that some disks would have arcs, or incomplete rings, which weren’t directly observed in a disk until 2016. The new simulation includes an additional new factor: radiation pressure, a force caused by starlight striking dust grains. Light exerts a minute physical force on everything it encounters. This radiation pressure propels solar sails and helps direct comet tails so they always point away from the Sun. The same force can push dust into highly eccentric orbits, and even blow some of the smaller grains out of the disk entirely. The new research modeled how radiation pressure and PeI work together to affect the movement of dust and gas, and also found that the two forces manifest different patterns depending on the physical properties of the dust and gas.”
Music credit: “Hyperborea” from Killer Tracks
Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessenger
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