NASA dixit:
“After launching in their Soyuz MS-06 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Expedition 53-54 Soyuz Commander Alexander Misurkin of Roscosmos and flight engineers Mark Vande Hei and Joe Acaba of NASA arrived at the International Space Station. The trio docked their Soyuz to the Poisk module on the Russian segment of the complex, to complete their six-hour journey to the station.”
Video credit: Roscosmos / NASA
NASA dixit:
“NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has explored the Saturn system since 2004, re-writing our understanding of the giant planet, its rings, moons and magnetosphere. For 13 years the spacecraft’s incredible, truly otherworldly images have revealed the wonder of Saturn in surprising, often awe-inspiring ways. Cassini is planetary exploration at its finest, proving that to truly reveal the grandeur of a world, there is no substitute for actually going there.”
Video credit: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
NASA dixit:
“June 15, 2013. Tethys, like many moons in the solar system, keeps one face pointed towards the planet around which it orbits. Tethys’ anti-Saturn face is seen here, fully illuminated, basking in sunlight. On the right side of the moon in this image is the huge crater Odysseus. The Odysseus crater is 280 miles (450 kilometers) across while Tethys is 660 miles (1,062 kilometers) across.
This view looks toward the anti-Saturn side of Tethys. North on Tethys is up and rotated 33 degrees to the right. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 503,000 miles (809,000 kilometers) from Tethys. Image scale is 3 miles (5 kilometers) per pixel.”
“After almost 20 years in space, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft begins the final chapter of its remarkable story of exploration: its Grand Finale. Between April and September 2017, Cassini will undertake a daring set of orbits that is, in many ways, like a whole new mission. Following a final close flyby of Saturn’s moon Titan, Cassini will leap over the planet’s icy rings and begin a series of 22 weekly dives between the planet and the rings.
No other mission has ever explored this unique region. What we learn from these final orbits will help to improve our understanding of how giant planets – and planetary systems everywhere – form and evolve.
On the final orbit, Cassini will plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere, sending back new and unique science to the very end. After losing contact with Earth, the spacecraft will burn up like a meteor, becoming part of the planet itself.
Cassini’s Grand Finale is about so much more than the spacecraft’s final dive into Saturn. That dramatic event is the capstone of six months of daring exploration and scientific discovery. And those six months are the thrilling final chapter in a historic 20-year journey.”
Image credit: NASA
NASA dixit:
“The final chapter in a remarkable mission of exploration and discovery, Cassini’s Grand Finale is in many ways like a brand new mission. Twenty-two times, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will dive through the unexplored space between Saturn and its rings. What we learn from these ultra-close passes over the planet could be some of the most exciting revelations ever returned by the long-lived spacecraft. This animated video tells the story of Cassini’s final, daring assignment and looks back at what the mission has accomplished.”
Video credit: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
NASA dixit:
“May 20, 2013. A thin sliver of Mimas is illuminated, the long shadows showing off its many craters, indicators of the moon’s violent history. The most famous evidence of a collision on Mimas (246 miles, or 396 kilometers across) is the crater Herschel that gives Mimas its Death Star-like appearance. This view looks toward the anti-Saturn hemisphere of Mimas. North on Mimas is up and rotated 40 degrees to the right. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera.
The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 100,000 miles (200,000 kilometers) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 130 degrees. Image scale is 4,000 feet (1 kilometer) per pixel.”
“After almost 20 years in space, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft begins the final chapter of its remarkable story of exploration: its Grand Finale. Between April and September 2017, Cassini will undertake a daring set of orbits that is, in many ways, like a whole new mission. Following a final close flyby of Saturn’s moon Titan, Cassini will leap over the planet’s icy rings and begin a series of 22 weekly dives between the planet and the rings.
No other mission has ever explored this unique region. What we learn from these final orbits will help to improve our understanding of how giant planets – and planetary systems everywhere – form and evolve.
On the final orbit, Cassini will plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere, sending back new and unique science to the very end. After losing contact with Earth, the spacecraft will burn up like a meteor, becoming part of the planet itself.
Cassini’s Grand Finale is about so much more than the spacecraft’s final dive into Saturn. That dramatic event is the capstone of six months of daring exploration and scientific discovery. And those six months are the thrilling final chapter in a historic 20-year journey.”
Image credit: NASA
NASA dixit:
“NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission has released its third year of survey data, with the spacecraft discovering 97 previously unknown celestial objects in the last year. Of those, 28 were near-Earth objects, 64 were main belt asteroids and five were comets. The spacecraft has now characterized a total of 693 near-Earth objects since the mission was re-started in December 2013. Of these, 114 are new. The NEOWISE team has released an animation depicting this solar system survey’s discoveries and characterizations for its third year of operations.
“NEOWISE is not only discovering previously uncharted asteroids and comets, but it is providing excellent data on many of those already in our catalog,” said Amy Mainzer, NEOWISE principal investigator from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “It is also proving to be an invaluable tool in in the refining and perfecting of techniques for near-Earth object discovery and characterization by a space-based infrared observatory.”
Near-Earth objects (NEOs) are comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of the planets in our solar system into orbits that allow them to enter Earth’s neighborhood. Ten of the objects discovered by NEOWISE in the past year have been classified as potentially hazardous asteroids, based on their size and their orbits. More than 2.6 million infrared images of the sky were collected in the third year of operations by NEOWISE. These data are combined with the Year 1 and 2 NEOWISE data into a single archive that contains approximately 7.7 million sets of images and a database of more than 57.7 billion source detections extracted from those images. The NEOWISE images also contain glimpses of rare objects, like comet C/2010 L5 WISE. A new technique of modeling comet behavior called tail-fitting showed that this particular comet experienced a brief outburst as it swept through the inner-solar system.
“Comets that have abrupt outbursts are not commonly found, but this may be due more to the sudden nature of the activity rather than their inherent rarity,” said Emily Kramer, a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at JPL and lead author of paper on the NEOWISE study. “It is great for astronomers to view and collect cometary data when they find an outburst, but since the activity is so short-lived, we may simply miss them most of the time.”
The tail-fitting technique identifies the size and quantity of dust particles in the vicinity of the comet, and when they were ejected from the comet’s nucleus, revealing the history of the comet’s activity. With tail-fitting, future all-sky surveys may be able to find and collect data on more cometary outburst activity when it happens. A paper detailing the tail-fitting technique and other results of the study was published in the March 20 volume of the Astrophysical Journal.
Originally called the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), the spacecraft was launched in December 2009. It was placed in hibernation in 2011 after its primary astrophysics mission was completed. In September 2013, it was reactivated, renamed NEOWISE and assigned a new mission: to assist NASA’s efforts to identify the population of potentially hazardous near-Earth objects. NEOWISE also is characterizing more distant populations of asteroids and comets to provide information about their sizes and compositions.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages the NEOWISE mission for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office within the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, built the science instrument. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colorado, built the spacecraft. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.”
Video credit: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Subscribe to blog posts using RSS