How The New Horizon’s Flyby Changed The Way We See Pluto 💓 [NASA/JPL] 

Orion Capsule interior. 🚀

Space Shuttle launch. 🌎🚀

Perseverance: Amazing descent & landing video taken by the rover’s EDL cameras.

The historic - and, rather eventful - test flight of the SpaceX SN8 prototype. In spite of its heavy landing and subsequent destruction of the craft, I think in most other respects, it was a resounding success.

Stars Make Firework Supplies!

The next time you see fireworks, take a moment to celebrate the cosmic pyrotechnics that made them possible. From the oxygen and potassium that help fireworks burn to the aluminum that makes sparklers sparkle, most of the elements in the universe wouldn’t be here without stars.

From the time the universe was only a few minutes old until it was about 400 million years old, the cosmos was made of just hydrogen, helium and a teensy bit of lithium. It took some stellar activity to produce the rest of the elements!

Stars are element factories

Even after more than 13 billion years, the hydrogen and helium that formed soon after the big bang still make up over 90 percent of the atoms in the cosmos. Most of the other elements come from stars.

Stars began popping into the universe about 400 million years after the big bang. That sounds like a long time, but it’s only about 3% of the universe’s current age!

Our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will study the universe’s early days to help us learn more about how we went from a hot, soupy sea of atoms to the bigger cosmic structures we see today. We know hydrogen and helium atoms gravitated together to form stars, where atoms could fuse together to make new elements, but we're not sure when it began happening. Roman will help us find out.

The central parts of atoms, called nuclei, are super antisocial – it takes a lot of heat and pressure to force them close together. Strong gravity in the fiery cores of the first stars provided just the right conditions for hydrogen and helium atoms to combine to form more elements and generate energy. The same process continues today in stars like our Sun and provides some special firework supplies.

Carbon makes fireworks explode, helps launch them into the sky, and is even an ingredient in the “black snakes” that seem to grow out of tiny pellets. Fireworks glow pink with help from the element lithium. Both of these elements are created by average, Sun-like stars as they cycle from normal stars to red giants to white dwarfs.

Eventually stars release their elements into the cosmos, where they can be recycled into later generations of stars and planets. Sometimes they encounter cosmic rays, which are nuclei that have been boosted to high speed by the most energetic events in the universe. When cosmic rays collide with atoms, the impact can break them apart, forming simpler elements. That’s how we get boron, which can make fireworks green, and beryllium, which can make them silver or white!

Since massive stars have even stronger gravity in their cores, they can fuse more elements – all the way up to iron. (The process stops there because instead of producing energy, fusing iron is so hard to do that it uses up energy.)

That means the sodium that makes fireworks yellow, the aluminum that produces silver sparks (like in sparklers), and even the oxygen that helps fireworks ignite were all first made in stars, too! A lot of these more complex elements that we take for granted are actually pretty rare throughout the cosmos, adding up to less than 10 percent of the atoms in the universe combined!

Fusion in stars only got us through iron on the periodic table, so where do the rest of our elements come from? It’s what happens next in massive stars that produces some of the even more exotic elements.

Dying stars make elements too!

Once a star many times the Sun’s mass burns through its fuel, gravity is no longer held in check, and its core collapses under its own weight. There, atoms are crushed extremely close together – and they don’t like that! Eventually it reaches a breaking point and the star explodes as a brilliant supernova. Talk about fireworks! These exploding stars make elements like copper, which makes fireworks blue, and zinc, which creates a smoky effect.

Something similar can happen when a white dwarf star – the small, dense core left behind after a Sun-like star runs out of fuel – steals material from a neighboring star. These white dwarfs can explode as supernovae too, spewing elements like the calcium that makes fireworks orange into the cosmos.

When stars collide

White dwarfs aren’t the only “dead” stars that can shower their surroundings with new elements. Stars that are too massive to leave behind white dwarfs but not massive enough to create black holes end up as neutron stars.

If two of these extremely dense stellar skeletons collide, they can produce all kinds of elements, including the barium that makes fireworks bright green and the antimony that creates a glitter effect. Reading this on a phone or computer? You can thank crashing dead stars for some of the metals that make up your device, too!

As for most of the remaining elements we know of, we've only seen them in labs on Earth so far.

Sounds like we’ve got it all figured out, right? But there are still lots of open questions. Our Roman Space Telescope will help us learn more about how elements were created and distributed throughout galaxies. That’s important because the right materials had to come together to form the air we breathe, our bodies, the planet we live on, and yes – even fireworks!

So when you’re watching fireworks, think about their cosmic origins!

Learn more about the Roman Space Telescope at: https://roman.gsfc.nasa.gov/

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Io - The Volcanic Moon

Looking like a giant pizza covered with melted cheese and splotches of tomato and ripe olives, Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. Volcanic plumes rise 300 km (190 miles) above the surface, with material spewing out at nearly half the required escape velocity.

A bit larger than Earth’s Moon, Io is the third largest of Jupiter’s moons, and the fifth one in distance from the planet.

Although Io always points the same side toward Jupiter in its orbit around the giant planet, the large moons Europa and Ganymede perturb Io’s orbit into an irregularly elliptical one. Thus, in its widely varying distances from Jupiter, Io is subjected to tremendous tidal forces. These forces cause Io’s surface to bulge up and down (or in and out) by as much as 100 m (330 feet)! Compare these tides on Io’s solid surface to the tides on Earth’s oceans. On Earth, in the place where tides are highest, the difference between low and high tides is only 18 m (60 feet), and this is for water, not solid ground!

This tidal pumping generates a tremendous amount of heat within Io, keeping much of its subsurface crust in liquid form seeking any available escape route to the surface to relieve the pressure. Thus, the surface of Io is constantly renewing itself, filling in any impact craters with molten lava lakes and spreading smooth new floodplains of liquid rock. The composition of this material is not yet entirely clear, but theories suggest that it is largely molten sulfur and its compounds (which would account for the varigated coloring) or silicate rock (which would better account for the apparent temperatures, which may be too hot to be sulfur). Sulfur dioxide is the primary constituent of a thin atmosphere on Io. It has no water to speak of, unlike the other, colder Galilean moons. Data from the Galileo spacecraft indicates that an iron core may form Io’s center, thus giving Io its own magnetic field.

Io was discovered on 8 January 1610 by Galileo Galilei. The discovery, along with three other Jovian moons, was the first time a moon was discovered orbiting a planet other than Earth.

Eruption of the Tvashtar volcano on Jupiter’s moon Io, photographed by New Horizons.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Galileo/New Horizons ( Stuart Rankin, Kevin Gill)

Source: NASA

Perseverance: Some early Navcam (navigation camera) images taken over the (Earth) weekend on sol 2. Originals are here: [1] [2] [3] [4]. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Update your phones with our #CountdownToMars wallpapers, like this one, today: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/perseverance-mars-rover-wallpaper-images/

It's LANDING DAY for our Perseverance Mars Rover and her mission to search for ancient signs of life on the Red Planet!

Watch LIVE coverage today starting at 2:15pm ET (18:15 UTC):

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Pluto as seen from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft ; Its heart-shaped sea is filled with poisonous ice.