The Solar System!

@little-laced Here are some test shots I took of the moon. It’s hard to tell because I had to reduce the image size drastically but the telescope was extremely difficult to keep focused. The image quality loss I incurred uploading this only adds to the ‘out-of-focus’ness

Also shout out to the Sea of Crises visible as the circular, dark-gray splotch on the right

Mars aka. Red Rock and a bunch of Pivot Irrigation crop circles

Getting to Mars: 4 Things We’re Doing Now

We’re working hard to send humans to Mars in the 2030s. Here are just a few of the things we’re doing now that are helping us prepare for the journey:

1. Research on the International Space Station

The International Space Station is the only microgravity platform for the long-term testing of new life support and crew health systems, advanced habitat modules and other technologies needed to decrease reliance on Earth.

When future explorers travel to the Red Planet, they will need to be able to grow plants for food, atmosphere recycling and physiological benefits. The Veggie experiment on space station is validating this technology right now! Astronauts have grown lettuce and Zinnia flowers in space so far.

The space station is also a perfect place to study the impacts of microgravity on the human body. One of the biggest hurdles of getting to Mars in ensuring that humans are “go” for a long-duration mission. Making sure that crew members will maintain their health and full capabilities for the duration of a Mars mission and after their return to Earth is extremely important. 

Scientists have solid data about how bodies respond to living in microgravity for six months, but significant data beyond that timeframe had not been collected…until now! Former astronaut Scott Kelly recently completed his Year in Space mission, where he spent a year aboard the space station to learn the impacts of microgravity on the human body.

A mission to Mars will likely last about three years, about half the time coming and going to Mars and about half the time on the Red Planet. We need to understand how human systems like vision and bone health are affected and what countermeasures can be taken to reduce or mitigate risks to crew members.

2. Utilizing Rovers & Tech to Gather Data

Through our robotic missions, we have already been on and around Mars for 40 years! Before we send humans to the Red Planet, it’s important that we have a thorough understanding of the Martian environment. Our landers and rovers are paving the way for human exploration. For example, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has helped us map the surface of Mars, which will be critical in selecting a future human landing site on the planet.

Our Mars 2020 rover will look for signs of past life, collect samples for possible future return to Earth and demonstrate technology for future human exploration of the Red Planet. These include testing a method for producing oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, identifying other resources (such as subsurface water), improving landing techniques and characterizing weather, dust and other potential environmental conditions that could affect future astronauts living and working on Mars.

We’re also developing a first-ever robotic mission to visit a large near-Earth asteroid, collect a multi-ton boulder from its surface and redirect it into a stable orbit around the moon. Once it’s there, astronauts will explore it and return with samples in the 2020s. This Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) is part of our plan to advance new technologies and spaceflight experience needed for a human mission to the Martian system in the 2030s.

3. Building the Ride

Okay, so we’ve talked about how we’re preparing for a journey to Mars…but what about the ride? Our Space Launch System, or SLS, is an advanced launch vehicle that will help us explore beyond Earth’s orbit into deep space. SLS will be the world’s most powerful rocket and will launch astronauts in our Orion spacecraft on missions to an asteroid and eventually to Mars.

In the rocket’s initial configuration it will be able to take 154,000 pounds of payload to space, which is equivalent to 12 fully grown elephants! It will be taller than the Statue of Liberty and it’s liftoff weight will be comparable to 8 fully-loaded 747 jets. At liftoff, it will have 8.8 million pounds of thrust, which is more than 31 times the total thrust of a 747 jet. One more fun fact for you…it will produce horsepower equivalent to 160,000 Corvette engines!

Sitting atop the SLS rocket will be our Orion spacecraft. Orion will be the safest most advanced spacecraft ever built, and will be flexible and capable enough to carry humans to a variety of destinations. Orion will serve as the exploration vehicle that will carry the crew to space, provide emergency abort capability, sustain the crew during space travel and provide safe re-entry from deep space return velocities.

4. Making it Sustainable

When humans get to Mars, where will they live? Where will they work? These are questions we’ve already thought about and are working toward solving. Six partners were recently selected to develop ground prototypes and/or conduct concept studies for deep space habitats.

These NextSTEP habitats will focus on creating prototypes of deep space habitats where humans can live and work independently for months or years at a time, without cargo supply deliveries from Earth.

Another way that we are studying habitats for space is on the space station. In June, the first human-rated expandable module deployed in space was used. The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) is a technology demonstration to investigate the potential challenges and benefits of expandable habitats for deep space exploration and commercial low-Earth orbit applications.

Our journey to Mars requires preparation and research in many areas. The powerful new Space Launch System rocket and the Orion spacecraft will travel into deep space, building on our decades of robotic Mars explorations, lessons learned on the International Space Station and groundbreaking new technologies.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Telescope Instruments Part One: 

What they are (humor me)

Astronomy is an old field. For ages astronomers have had to be satisfied looking at the sky and interpreting what they saw as somehow connected to their Earthly lives. Zeus carried Ganymede off into the heavens and similarly the sky was a place of supernatural awe, somewhere that held your fortunes, a place the dead go, somewhere a child could be carried off to by a god.

Remarkable natural events like storms and lightning blistering over our us long seemed to confirm any and all suspicion and belief. For what could be responsible for something like lightning but a god? What else could the Sun be, but some divine light? Though the atoms in our bodies don’t remember where they come from, the answers have always been there, elusive.

When people finally started looking from the Sun to the stars in skeptical comparison, it was symbolically the beginning of a new age for astronomy. The stars weren’t pinholes in the sky, nor were they jewels (well some are “diamonds” but that was just a remarkably good guess!). Stars, people gradually realized, were kin to our own Sun. Could there be other Earths?

This truth is so grand, and it implies a universe so vast that it was more unbelievable to people than to simply go on assuming the lightning came from the likes of a “Zeus”. Human creativity, intellect and curiosity grew, however. We kept exploring and questioning until at last the technology we created harnessed the very electricity we used to fear.

In a sublime twist of irony Polyphemus, fire in hand, took to the heavens.

We have learned, in our exploration of nature, that we are not helpless. The divinity we saw in the heavens is literally same stuff that makes our blood red. We were of the sky all along and all it took was the most human part of us to figure this out: our curiosity.

Embracing our knack for exploration, however wasn’t exactly an easy truth. Our stories of gods in chariots dragging the Sun across the sky weren’t simply backwards: they were entirely simplistic. The universe astounded us for so long because our imaginations failed in grandiosity. The universe was the better magician and we simply didn’t know the tricks.

The technology which has resulted from our scientific exploration has similarly become more sophisticated. Out of necessity, we constantly invent new tools to solve old problems, which traditionally reveal another problem hitherto unknown.

The progression looks like this:

Astronomers stare up and wonder if the bright dot is a god or another planet.

Galileo invents the telescope and realizes that yes, there are other planets, but only a couple of the dots were visible - for most of them distance was too great to discern anything.

As math and science progressed, we became able to calculate the brightness, accounted for distance and it was obvious that all the bright dots unobservable with telescopes were roughly as bright as our Sun. Not all the dots fit this description though as some were very hazy and smoky looking.

Hubble then figures out that some of those hazy things are other galaxies, not just stars, but this extraordinary realization meant the universe was larger than the Milky Way! How could it be that another galaxy was all the way across space like that? Why did they seem to be moving farther from us faster, the farther they were?

I’ll stop there. You get the point. The progression of science has been met a proportional progression of mystery. This is as true today as it’s been since the dawn of science. The question then becomes this:

What is it that allows us to repeatedly push the darkness of ignorance away, to repeatedly domesticate the mysterious and turn the mystical forces of the universe to our personal use?

Our technology. Again, using our creativity and intellect as hammer and anvil, we forge miraculous solutions to unsolvable problems.

In astronomy, our resources are especially limited given the incredible distances that separate us from our targets. How can we possibly know anything about a planet orbiting a star hundreds of light years away?

In a way mother nature almost commit the perfect crime. It left one prolific clue behind though: light. Because of things like light’s dual wave-particle nature, techniques like spectroscopy and our growing ability to respond to and control our optics’ environments, astronomers are hot on multiple trails.

I want to explore and introduce you to some basic principles of the special mechanical eyes astronomers build which turn an otherwise invisible universe, into a bright, transparent scroll to our curiosity.

(Will be continued in part two)

(Image credit: NASA and Chris Gunn)

bioshock infinite is about to become reality

The beautiful chaos of watching 12 frantic astrophysics students try to save a theoretical astronaut from falling into a black hole. I’ve never seen a group of people work so quickly and efficiently before.

@maevemauvaise I doubt the full results of this experiment are going to be released soon, but I’ll post and tag you when I find them!

Images of Jupiter taken by JunoCam on NASA’s Juno spacecraft.

Mission Juno

Juno is a NASA spacecraft. It is exploring the planet Jupiter. Juno launched from Earth in 2011. It reached Jupiter in 2016. That was a five-year trip!

The name “Juno” comes from stories told by the Romans long ago. In the stories, Juno was the wife of Jupiter. Jupiter hid behind clouds so no one could see him causing trouble. But Juno could see through the clouds.

Juno has science tools to study Jupiter’s atmosphere. (The atmosphere is the layer of gases around a planet.) Juno will take the first pictures of Jupiter’s poles. The spacecraft will study the lights around Jupiter’s north and south poles, too.

Juno will help scientists understand how Jupiter was made. The spacecraft will help them learn how Jupiter has changed, too. The new discoveries can help us understand more about our solar system.

Sound of Jupiter’s Magnetosphere: Click here

Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Mission Juno / Jason Major / Luca Fornaciari /  Gerald Eichstädt

NASA is building the next Mars rover in mixed reality and It’s absolutely jaw-dropping!

Thanks to Trump, Scientists Are Planning to Run For Office

And they’ve got help.

For American science, the next four years look to be challenging. The newly inaugurated President Trump, and many of his Cabinet picks, have repeatedly cast doubt upon the reality of human-made climate change, questioned the repeatedly proven safety of vaccines. Since the inauguration, the administration has already frozen grants and contracts by the Environmental Protection Agency and gagged researchers at the US Department of Agriculture. Many scientists are asking themselves: What can I do?

And the answer from a newly formed group called 314 Action is: Get elected.

The organization, named after the first three digits of pi, is a political action committee that was created to support scientists in running for office. It’s the science version of Emily’s List, which focuses on pro-choice female candidates, or VoteVets, which backs war veterans. “A lot of scientists traditionally feel that science is above politics but we’re seeing that politics is not above getting involved in science,” says founder Shaughnessy Naughton. 

“We’re losing, and the only way to stop that is to get more people with scientific backgrounds at the table.”

(Continue Reading)