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PHOTO OF THE WEEK
This week for Photo of the Week we would like to feature a spectacular shot of the Milky Way taken by the talented photographer Jon Presto (aka Circa Orion). This beautiful photo of our home galaxy above a country road is of interest because it was taken in Montauk, New York. This small town, located on the east end of Long Island shows that even living in a big metropolitan area like New York City does not mean that an astrophotographer’s love for the stars cannot be quenched on a clear summer evening. For more fantastic photos, be sure to check out Presto’s Instagram @jon_presto_ at https://www.instagram.com/jon_presto_/ or his website at http://www.circaorion.com/CircaOrion/Home
Planets: As Seen by Voyager
The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft explored Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune before starting their journey toward interstellar space. Here you’ll find some of those images, including “The Pale Blue Dot” – famously described by Carl Sagan – and what are still the only up-close images of Uranus and Neptune.
These twin spacecraft took some of the very first close-up images of these planets and paved the way for future planetary missions to return, like the Juno spacecraft at Jupiter, Cassini at Saturn and New Horizons at Pluto.
Jupiter
Photography of Jupiter began in January 1979, when images of the brightly banded planet already exceeded the best taken from Earth. They took more than 33,000 pictures of Jupiter and its five major satellites.
Findings:
- Erupting volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io, which has 100 times the volcanic activity of Earth.
- Better understanding of important physical, geological, and atmospheric processes happening in the planet, its satellites and magnetosphere.
- Jupiter’s turbulent atmosphere with dozens of interacting hurricane-like storm systems.
Saturn
The Saturn encounters occurred nine months apart, in November 1980 and August 1981. The two encounters increased our knowledge and altered our understanding of Saturn. The extended, close-range observations provided high-resolution data far different from the picture assembled during centuries of Earth-based studies.
Findings:
- Saturn’s atmosphere is almost entirely hydrogen and helium.
- Subdued contrasts and color differences on Saturn could be a result of more horizontal mixing or less production of localized colors than in Jupiter’s atmosphere.
- An indication of an ocean beneath the cracked, icy crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa.
- Winds blow at high speeds in Saturn. Near the equator, the Voyagers measured winds about 1,100 miles an hour.
Uranus
The Voyager 2 spacecraft flew closely past distant Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun. At its closest, the spacecraft came within 50,600 miles of Uranus’s cloud tops on Jan. 24, 1986. Voyager 2 radioed thousands of images and voluminous amounts of other scientific data on the planet, its moons, rings, atmosphere, interior and the magnetic environment surrounding Uranus.
Findings:
- Revealed complex surfaces indicative of varying geologic pasts.
- Detected 11 previously unseen moons.
- Uncovered the fine detail of the previously known rings and two newly detected rings.
- Showed that the planet’s rate of rotation is 17 hours, 14 minutes.
- Found that the planet’s magnetic field is both large and unusual.
- Determined that the temperature of the equatorial region, which receives less sunlight over a Uranian year, is nevertheless about the same as that at the poles.
Neptune
Voyager 2 became the first spacecraft to observe the planet Neptune in the summer of 1989. Passing about 3,000 miles above Neptune’s north pole, Voyager 2 made its closest approach to any planet since leaving Earth 12 years ago. Five hours later, Voyager 2 passed about 25,000 miles from Neptune’s largest moon, Triton, the last solid body the spacecraft had the opportunity to study.
Findings:
- Discovered Neptune’s Great Dark Spot
- Found that the planet has strong winds, around 1,000 miles per hour
- Saw geysers erupting from the polar cap on Neptune’s moon Triton at -390 degrees Fahrenheit
Solar System Portrait
This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed ‘Pale Blue Dot’, is a part of the first ever ‘portrait’ of the solar system taken by Voyager 1.
The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic.
From Voyager’s great distance, Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera.
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.” - Carl Sagan
Both spacecraft will continue to study ultraviolet sources among the stars, and their fields and particles detectors will continue to search for the boundary between the Sun’s influence and interstellar space. The radioisotope power systems will likely provide enough power for science to continue through 2025, and possibly support engineering data return through the mid-2030s. After that, the two Voyagers will continue to orbit the center of the Milky Way.
Learn more about the Voyager spacecraft HERE.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.
Let Us See Jupiter Through Your Eyes
Our Juno spacecraft will fly over Jupiter’s Great Red Spot on July 10 at 10:06 p.m. EDT. This will be humanity’s first up-close and personal view of the gas giant’s iconic 10,000-mile-wide storm, which has been monitored since 1830 and possibly existing for more than 350 years.
The data collection of the Great Red Spot is part of Juno’s sixth science flyby over Jupiter’s mysterious cloud tops. Perijove (the point at which an orbit comes closest to Jupiter’s center) will be July 10 at 9:55 p.m. EDT.
At the time of perijove, Juno will be about 2,200 miles above the planet’s cloud tops. Eleven minutes and 33 seconds later…Juno will have covered another 24,713 miles and will be directly above the coiling crimson cloud tops of the Great Red Spot. The spacecraft will pass about 5,600 miles above its clouds.
When will we see images from this flyby?
During the flyby, all eight of the spacecraft’s instruments will be turned on, as well as its imager, JunoCam. Because the spacecraft will be collecting data with its Microwave Radiometer (MWR), which measures radio waves from Jupiter’s deep atmosphere, we cannot downlink information during the pass. The MWR can tell us how much water there is and how material is moving far below the cloud tops.
During the pass, all data will be stored on-board…with a downlink planned afterwards. Once the downlink begins, engineering data from the spacecraft’s instruments will come to Earth first, followed by images from JunoCam.
The unprocessed, raw images will be located HERE, on approximately July 14. Follow @NASAJuno on Twitter for updates.
Did you know you can download and process these raw images?
We invite the public to act as a virtual imaging team…participating in key steps of the process, from identifying features of interest to sharing the finished images online. After JunoCam data arrives on Earth, members of the public can process the images to create color pictures. The public also helps determine which points on the planet will be photographed. Learn more about voting on JunoCam’s next target HERE.
JunoCam has four filters: red, green, blue and near-infrared. We get red, green and blue strips on one spacecraft rotation (the spacecraft rotation rate is 2 revolutions per minute) and the near-infrared strips on the second rotation. To get the final image product, the strips must be stitched together and the colors lined up.
Anything from cropping to color enhancing to collaging is fair game. Be creative!
Submit your images to Juno_outreach@jpl.nasa.gov to be featured on the Mission Juno website!
Check out some of these citizen-scientist processed images from previous Juno orbits:
Credit: Sean Doran (More)
Credit: Amelia Carolina (More)
Credit: Michael Ranger (More)
Credit: Jason Major (More)
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com
Nebula Images: http://nebulaimages.com/ Astronomy articles: http://astronomyisawesome.com/
Source: nebulaimages.com
SpaceX makes landing a rocket look easy 👏
Yesterday (19 Feb 2017), the second stage of Falcon 9 boosted a Dragon cargo capsule into orbit to deliver equipment to the International Space Station, and the first stage flew back and touched down on solid ground. It was the 8th successful landing (out of total 13) for SpaceX.
Every success brings Elon Musk’s vision of a fully reusable rocket transport system (between Earth and Mars) closer.
Five Planets and the Moon over Australia, the planets all appear confined to a single band
Solar System: Things to Know This Week
See our home planet from Mars, learn about our latest Discovery missions, see stunning imagery from the Cassini mission and more!
1. Our Home
The powerful HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took this incredible image of our home and moon. The image combines two separate exposures taken on Nov. 20, 2016.
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2. Our Latest Missions of Discovery
We’ve selected two new missions to explore the early solar system. Lucy, a robotic spacecraft scheduled to launch in October 2021, is slated to arrive at its first destination, a main belt asteroid, in 2025. From 2027 to 2033, Lucy will explore six Jupiter Trojan asteroids. These asteroids are trapped by Jupiter’s gravity in two swarms that share the planet’s orbit, one leading and one trailing Jupiter in its 12-year circuit around the sun.
Psyche, targeted to launch in October 2023, will explore one of the most intriguing targets in the main asteroid belt–a giant metal asteroid, known as 16 Psyche. The asteroid is about 130 miles (210 kilometers) in diameter and thought to be comprised mostly of iron and nickel, similar to Earth’s core.
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3. Image From Cassini
Cassini took so many jaw-dropping photos last year, how could anyone choose just 10? Well, the Cassini team didn’t. Here are 17 amazing photos from Saturn and its moons last year.
4. The Colors of Mars
Impact craters have exposed the subsurface materials on the steep slopes of Mars. However, these slopes often experience rockfalls and debris avalanches that keep the surface clean of dust, revealing a variety of hues, like in this enhanced-color image from our Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, representing different rock types.
5. More From New Horizons
Even though our New Horizons mission flew by Pluto in 2015, the scientific discoveries keep coming. Using a model similar to what meteorologists use to forecast weather and a computer simulation of the physics of evaporating ices, scientists have found evidence of snow and ice features that, until now, had only been seen on Earth.
Discover the full list of 10 things to know about our solar system this week HERE.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com
The bright star-forming ring that surrounds the heart of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1097
Nebula Images: http://nebulaimages.com/
Astronomy articles: http://astronomyisawesome.com/
Source: nebulaimages.com
An amazing “edge-on” view of a spiral galaxy 55 million light years from Earth has been captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.
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Live Game Simulator: Click http://tinyurl.com/jagjgym to start
Looking Through the Eye of the Universe in Moab, Utah by Ty MacDonald
The massive compact star cluster in NGC 3603 and its surroundings
Nebula Images: http://nebulaimages.com/
Astronomy articles: http://astronomyisawesome.com/
Source: nebulaimages.com