As it moved inland heading north over western Louisiana, Laura was overflown by the NASA / JAXA GPM Core Observatory satellite on Wednesday August 26th, shortly before the storm made landfall, then again on Thursday August 27th, about 7 hours after making landfall, as shown in the animation above.
This animation takes the viewer on a simulated journey into Jupiter’s exotic high-altitude electrical storms. Get an up-close view of Mission Juno’s newly discovered “shallow lighting” flashes and dive into the violent atmospheric jet of the Nautilus cloud. The smallest white “pop-up” clouds on top of the Nautilus are about 100 km across. The ride navigates through Jupiter’s towering thunderstorms, dodging the spray of ammonia-water rain, and shallow lighting flashes. At these altitudes — too cold for pure liquid water to exit – ammonia gas acts like an antifreeze that melts the water ice crystals flung up to these heights by Jupiter’s powerful storms – giving Jupiter an unexpected ammonia-water cloud that can electrify the sky. The animation was created by combining an image of high-altitude clouds from the JunoCam imager on NASA’s Juno spacecraft with a computer-generated animation.
Video credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gil/Animation: Koji Kuramura/Music: Vangelis
Mars’ nightside atmosphere glows and pulsates in this data animation from MAVEN spacecraft observations. Green-to-white false color shows the enhanced brightenings on Mars’ ultraviolet “nightglow” measured by MAVEN’s Imaging UltraViolet Spectrograph at about 70 kilometers (approximately 40 miles) altitude. A simulated view of the Mars globe is added digitally for context, with ice caps visible at the poles. Three nightglow brightenings occur over one Mars rotation, the first much brighter than the other two. All three brightenings occur shortly after sunset, appearing on the left of this view of the night side of the planet. The pulsations are caused by downwards winds which enhance the chemical reaction creating nitric oxide which causes the glow. Months of data were averaged to identify these patterns, indicating they repeat nightly.
Video credit: NASA/MAVEN/Goddard Space Flight Center/CU/LASP
NASA’s Lucy mission is launching in 2021 and will fly by seven different Trojan asteroids that are orbiting the same distance from the Sun as Jupiter. This video highlights the four main science objectives and the instruments aboard the spacecraft that will be utilized. Lucy will be the first space mission to study the Trojan asteroids, which are remnants of our early solar system.
Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Produced & Edited by: David Ladd (USRA)/Animations by: David Ladd (USRA), Walt Feimer (KBRwyle), Jacquelyn DeMink (USRA), Michael Lentz (USRA), Jonathan North (USRA)/Music: “Feels Good” – Wally Gagel & Xandy Barry [ASCAP], provided by Universal Production Music
This video uses data gathered from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft to recreate some of the stunning views of the Moon that the Apollo 13 astronauts saw on their perilous journey around the farside in 1970. These visualizations, in 4K resolution, depict many different views of the lunar surface, starting with earthset and sunrise and concluding with the time Apollo 13 reestablished radio contact with Mission Control. Also depicted is the path of the free return trajectory around the Moon, and a continuous view of the Moon throughout that path. All views have been sped up for timing purposes.
Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Data Visualization by: Ernie Wright (USRA)/Video Produced & Edited by: David Ladd (USRA)/Music provided by Universal Production Music: “Visions of Grandeur” – Frederick Wiedmann
When amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov discovered an interstellar comet zipping through our solar system on Aug. 30, 2019, scientists promptly turned their telescopes toward it hoping to catch a glimpse of this rare and ephemeral event. After all, no one had ever set eyes on a confirmed comet from a foreign star system, and it was clear from its projected trajectory that the alien visitor, named 2I/Borisov, would soon disappear from the sky forever.
Before it dimmed from view, a team of international scientists led by Martin Cordiner and Stefanie Milam at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, probed it with the world’s most powerful radio telescope: the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in northern Chile. The comet was near its closest approach to Earth at about 180 million miles, or nearly 300 million kilometers, away.
When the scientists peeked inside the halo of gas that formed around the comet as it came closer to the Sun and its ices began to vaporize, they detected something peculiar: 2I/Borisov was releasing gas with a greater concentration of carbon monoxide (CO) than anyone had detected in any comet at a similar distance from the Sun (within less than 186 million miles, or 300 million kilometers). 2I/Borisov’s CO concentration was estimated to be between nine and 26 times higher than that of the average solar system comet.
Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/James Tralie (ADNET): Lead Producer, Lead Editor, Narrator/Lonnie Shekhtman (ADNET): Lead Writer/Martin Cordiner (Catholic University of America): Scientist, Stefanie Milam (NASA/GSFC): Scientist/ Aaron E. Lepsch (ADNET): Technical Support