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NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
July 25, 2024
NGC 7023: The Iris Nebula
These cosmic clouds have blossomed 1,300 light-years away in the fertile starfields of the constellation Cepheus. Called the Iris Nebula, NGC 7023 is not the only nebula to evoke the imagery of flowers. Still, this deep telescopic image shows off the Iris Nebula's range of colors and symmetries embedded in surrounding fields of interstellar dust. Within the Iris itself, dusty nebular material surrounds a hot, young star. The dominant color of the brighter reflection nebula is blue, characteristic of dust grains reflecting starlight. Central filaments of the reflection nebula glow with a faint reddish photoluminescence as some dust grains effectively convert the star's invisible ultraviolet radiation to visible red light. Infrared observations indicate that this nebula contains complex carbon molecules known as PAHs. The dusty blue petals of the Iris Nebula span about six light-years.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html?
The Marshall Star for July 24, 2024
CONTENTS
25 Years On, Chandra Highlights Legacy of NASA Engineering Ingenuity
NASA Sounding Rocket Launches, Studies Heating of Sun’s Active Regions
From 1 Crew to Another: Artemis II Astronauts Meet NASA Barge Crew
I am Artemis: John Campbell
Icelandic Graduate Student Brings High-Performance Computing Knowledge to IMPACT
Delta Aquariid Meteor Shower Best Seen in Southern Hemisphere in Late July
Juno Mission Captures Colorful, Chaotic Clouds of Jupiter
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/marshall/the-marshall-star-for-july-24-2024/
Get the hooker drone
A Saturnian Summer
JUL 24, 2024
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of Saturn and its colossal rings on July 4, 2020, during summer in the gas giant’s northern hemisphere.
Two of Saturn’s icy moons are also clearly visible: Mimas at right, and Enceladus at bottom.
The light reddish haze over the northern hemisphere seen in this color composite could be due to heating from increased sunlight, which could either change the atmospheric circulation or remove ices from aerosols in the atmosphere.
Another theory is that the increased sunlight in the summer months is changing the amounts of photochemical haze produced.
Conversely, the just-now-visible south pole has a blue hue, reflecting changes in Saturn’s winter hemisphere.
This image was taken as part of the Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) project.
OPAL is helping scientists understand the atmospheric dynamics and evolution of our solar system’s gas giant planets.
In Saturn’s case, astronomers continue tracking shifting weather patterns and storms.
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/a-saturnian-summer/
UPDATE: NASA, Boeing to Stream Flight Test Mission Briefing on NASA+
JUL 24, 2024
NASA and Boeing will host a news conference with mission leadership at 11:30 a.m. EDT Thursday, July 25, to provide the latest status of the agency’s Boeing Crew Flight Test aboard the International Space Station. NASA previously planned an audio-only media teleconference to host the discussion.
The agency will provide live coverage on NASA+, NASA Television, the NASA app, YouTube, and the agency’s website.
Learn how to stream NASA content through a variety of platforms, including social media.
Participants include:
Steve Stich, manager, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program
Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager, Commercial Crew Program, Boeing
United States-based media seeking to attend in person must contact the newsroom at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston no later than 9:30 a.m. EDT Thursday, July 25, at 281-483-5111 or jsccommu@mail.nasa.gov. U.S. and international media interested in participating by phone must contact NASA Johnson or NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at ksc-newsroom@mail.nasa.gov by 10:30 a.m. the day of the event.
A copy of NASA’s media accreditation policy is online.
Engineering teams with NASA and Boeing recently completed ground hot fire testing of a Starliner reaction control system thruster at White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico. The test series involved firing the engine through similar in-flight conditions the spacecraft experienced during its approach to the space station, as well as various stress-case firings for what is expected during Starliner’s undocking and the deorbit burn that will position the spacecraft for a landing in the southwestern United States. Teams are analyzing the data from these tests, and leadership plans to discuss initial findings during the briefing.
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams arrived at the orbiting laboratory on June 6, after lifting off aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on June 5. Since their arrival, the duo has been integrated with the Expedition 71 crew, performing scientific research and maintenance activities as needed.
As part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, the mission is an end-to-end test of the Starliner system. Following a successful return to Earth, NASA will begin the process of certifying Starliner for rotational missions to the International Space Station. Through partnership with American private industry, NASA is opening access to low Earth orbit and the space station to more people, science, and commercial opportunities.
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/update-nasa-boeing-to-stream-flight-test-mission-briefing-on-nasa/
https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/heliophysics/nasas-icon-mission-ends-with-several-ionospheric-breakthroughs/
NASA’s ICON Mission Ends with Several Ionospheric Breakthroughs
JUL 24, 2024
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NASA’s ICON mission studied the outermost layer of Earth’s atmosphere called the ionosphere.
ICON provided critical insights into interplay between space weather and Earth’s weather.
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The mission gathered unprecedented detail of airglow, showed a relationship between the atmosphere’s ions and Earth’s magnetic field lines, and provided the first concrete observation to confirm Earth’s long-theorized ionospheric dynamo.
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Nearly a year after ICON accomplished its primary mission, communication was lost in November 2022 for unclear reasons.
NASA formally concluded the mission after several months of troubleshooting could not regain contact.
After contributing to many important findings on the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space — an area where space weather can interfere with both satellites and communications signals — NASA’s ICON (Ionospheric Connection Explorer) mission has come to an end.
The mission launched in October 2019 and completed its two-year mission objectives in December 2021, before going on to operate as an extended mission for another year.
“The ICON mission has truly lived up to its name,” said Joseph Westlake, heliophysics division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
“Not only did ICON successfully complete and exceed its primary mission objectives, it also provided critical insights into the ionosphere and the interplay between space and terrestrial weather.”
The ICON spacecraft orbited in a part of our planet’s outermost layer of the atmosphere, called the ionosphere, where it studied what events impact the ionosphere, including Earth’s weather from below and space weather from above.
The ionosphere is the lowest boundary of space, located between 55 miles to 360 miles above Earth’s surface.
It is made up of a sea of particles that have been ionized: a mix of positively charged ions and negatively charged electrons called plasma.
This frontier of space is a dynamic and busy region, home to many satellites — including the International Space Station — and is a conduit for radio communications and GPS signals.
Both satellites and signals can be disrupted by the complex interactions of terrestrial and space weather, so studying and understanding the ionosphere is crucial to understanding space weather and its effects on our technology.
The ICON mission captured unprecedented data about the ionosphere with direct measurements of the charged gas in its immediate surroundings alongside images of one of the ionosphere's most stunning features — airglow.
ICON tracked the colorful bands as they moved through the ionosphere. Airglow is created by a process similar to what creates the aurora.
However, airglow occurs around the world, not just at the northern and southern latitudes where auroras are typically found.
Although airglow is normally dim, ICON’s instruments were specially designed to capture even the faintest glow in order to build a picture of the ionosphere’s density, composition, and structure.
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By measuring Doppler shift, ICON’s sensitive imagers also detected the motion of the atmosphere as it glowed.
“It’s like measuring a train’s speed by detecting the change in the pitch of its horn — but with light,” said Thomas Immel, ICON mission lead at the University of California, Berkeley.
The mission was specifically designed to perform this technically difficult measurement.
A New Ionospheric Perspective
The ICON mission’s comprehensive view of the upper atmosphere provided valuable data for scientists to unravel for years to come.
For instance, its measurements showed how the 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcanic eruption disrupted electrical currents in the ionosphere.
“ICON was able to capture the speed of the volcanic eruption, allowing us to directly see how it affected the motion of charged particles in the ionosphere,” Immel said.
“This was a clear example of the connection between tropical weather and ionospheric structure. ICON showed us how things that happen in terrestrial weather have a direct correlation with events in space.”
Another scientific breakthrough was ICON’s measurements of the motion of ions in the atmosphere and their relationship with Earth’s magnetic field lines.
“It was truly unique,” Immel said. “ICON’s measurements of the motion of ions in the atmosphere was scientifically transformational in our understanding of behavior in the ionosphere.”
With ICON’s help, scientists better understand how these interactions drive a process called the ionospheric dynamo. The dynamo, which lies at the bottom of the ionosphere, remained a mystery for decades because it is difficult to observe.
ICON provided the first concrete observation of winds fueling the dynamo and how this influences space weather.
Unpredictable terrestrial winds move plasma around the ionosphere, sending the charged particles shooting out into space or plummeting toward Earth.
This electrically charged tug-of-war between the ionosphere and Earth’s electromagnetic fields acts as a generator, creating complex electric and magnetic fields that can affect both technology and the ionosphere itself.
“No one had ever seen this before,” Immel said. “ICON finally and conclusively provided experimental confirmation of the wind dynamo theory.”
An Iconic Legacy
On Nov. 25, 2022, the ICON team lost contact with the spacecraft. Communication with the spacecraft could not be established, even after performing a power cycle reset using a built-in command loss timer.
Though the spacecraft remains intact, other troubleshooting techniques were unable to re-establish contact between the ICON spacecraft and mission operators.
“ICON’s legacy will live on through the breakthrough knowledge it provided while it was active and the vast dataset from its observations that will continue to yield new science,” Westlake said.
“ICON serves as a foundation for new missions to come.”
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https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-images-cold-exoplanet-12-light-years-away/
NASA’s Webb Images Cold Exoplanet 12 Light-Years Away
JUL 24, 2024
An international team of astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has directly imaged an exoplanet roughly 12 light-years from Earth.
The planet, Epsilon Indi Ab, is one of the coldest exoplanets observed to date.
The planet is several times the mass of Jupiter and orbits the K-type star Epsilon Indi A (Eps Ind A), which is around the age of our Sun, but slightly cooler.
The team observed Epsilon Indi Ab using the coronagraph on Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument). Only a few tens of exoplanets have been directly imaged previously by space- and ground-based observatories.
“Our prior observations of this system have been more indirect measurements of the star, which actually allowed us to see ahead of time that there was likely a giant planet in this system tugging on the star,” said team member Caroline Morley of the University of Texas at Austin.
“That's why our team chose this system to observe first with Webb.”
“This discovery is exciting because the planet is quite similar to Jupiter — it is a little warmer and is more massive, but is more similar to Jupiter than any other planet that has been imaged so far,” added lead author Elisabeth Matthews of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany.
Previously imaged exoplanets tend to be the youngest, hottest exoplanets that are still radiating much of the energy from when they first formed.
As planets cool and contract over their lifetime, they become significantly fainter and therefore harder to image.
A Solar System Analog
“Cold planets are very faint, and most of their emission is in the mid-infrared,” explained Matthews. “Webb is ideally suited to conduct mid-infrared imaging, which is extremely hard to do from the ground.
We also needed good spatial resolution to separate the planet and the star in our images, and the large Webb mirror is extremely helpful in this aspect.”
Epsilon Indi Ab is one of the coldest exoplanets to be directly detected, with an estimated temperature of 35 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) — colder than any other imaged planet beyond our solar system, and colder than all but one free-floating brown dwarf.
The planet is only around 180 degrees Fahrenheit (100 degrees Celsius) warmer than gas giants in our solar system.
This provides a rare opportunity for astronomers to study the atmospheric composition of true solar system analogs.
“Astronomers have been imagining planets in this system for decades; fictional planets orbiting Epsilon Indi have been the sites of Star Trek episodes, novels, and video games like Halo,” added Morley.
“It's exciting to actually see a planet there ourselves, and begin to measure its properties.”
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Not Quite As Predicted
Epsilon Indi Ab is the twelfth closest exoplanet to Earth known to date and the closest planet more massive than Jupiter.
The science team chose to study Eps Ind A because the system showed hints of a possible planetary body using a technique called radial velocity, which measures the back-and-forth wobbles of the host star along our line of sight.
“While we expected to image a planet in this system, because there were radial velocity indications of its presence, the planet we found isn’t what we had predicted,” shared Matthews.
“It’s about twice as massive, a little farther from its star, and has a different orbit than we expected.
The cause of this discrepancy remains an open question. The atmosphere of the planet also appears to be a little different than the model predictions.
So far we only have a few photometric measurements of the atmosphere, meaning that it is hard to draw conclusions, but the planet is fainter than expected at shorter wavelengths.”
The team believes this may mean there is significant methane, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere that are absorbing the shorter wavelengths of light.
It might also suggest a very cloudy atmosphere. The direct imaging of exoplanets is particularly valuable for characterization.
Scientists can directly collect light from the observed planet and compare its brightness at different wavelengths.
So far, the science team has only detected Epsilon Indi Ab at a few wavelengths, but they hope to revisit the planet with Webb to conduct both photometric and spectroscopic observations in the future.
They also hope to detect other similar planets with Webb to find possible trends about their atmospheres and how these objects form.
NASA's upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will use a coronagraph to demonstrate direct imaging technology by photographing Jupiter-like worlds orbiting Sun-like stars – something that has never been done before.
These results will pave the way for future missions to study worlds that are even more Earth-like.
These results were taken with Webb’s Cycle 1 General Observer program 2243 and have been published in the journal Nature.
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https://www.space.com/cancer-research-international-space-station-nasa-moonshot
ISS scientists make headway in cancer research: 'We're NASA, we do Moonshots'
July 25, 2024
"Why do we go to space?" asked NASA administrator Bill Nelson to a small crowd at NASA headquarters last week.
"We go to explore the heavens, but we also go to improve life here on Earth, and that includes attacking this dreaded disease that we know is cancer."
Nelson was speaking at an event held in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to give an update on progress that the respective agencies are making toward the White House's Cancer Moonshot initiative, originally launched in 2016.
The program involves collaboration between NASA scientists, doctors and researchers, alongside the US federal government, all of whom aim to cut national cancer rates by at least 50% over the next 25 years.
Stated on the White House website, "We're building a world where the word 'cancer' loses its power, a diagnosis isn’t a death sentence, we prevent cancer before it starts, we catch cancer early so people live longer and healthier lives, and patients and families don’t have to navigate their cancer journey alone."
This is an ambitious goal. Cancer is among the leading causes of death worldwide, with almost 20 million new cases and 9.7 million cancer-related deaths reported in 2022 alone, according to the National Cancer Institute (NCI) — and these numbers are only expected to rise.
Compounding the issue is the fact that not all cancers are created equal — only a handful have well-vetted, early-detection protocols, not to mention treatment options and promising survival rates.
Breast cancer, for example, has an almost 90% five year survival rate while lung cancer, liver cancer, colon and rectal cancer (the latter of which is currently on the rise in terms of diagnosis), have poorer outcomes.
NASA scientists are uniquely positioned to help explore how cancer cells develop, function, and respond to treatment, said Nelson. Testing tumors outside the body isn’t a new concept, but cells behave differently in space under microgravity.
In this environment, cells become incredibly stressed, causing them to age more rapidly and, when cancerous, progress disease more quickly than on Earth.
"Cells grow differently," said Nelson. "Tumors develop differently. Tissues can form differently, […] and that means medicines can be tested differently."
Many experiments are conducted on the International Space Station (ISS), for that matter, which contains the world's most sophisticated microgravity laboratory. And some of those experiments are particularly focused on cancer research.
"Astronauts and teams on Earth perform groundbreaking research every day, and since November of 2000, we've had almost 4,000 different experiments representing more than 5,000 researchers from over 100 countries," stated Jenny Turner, a representative of the space station's research Integration Office at NASA Johnson Space Center, at the briefing.
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In fact, exciting progress has recently been made in areas including protein crystallization , nanoparticle drug delivery, tissue engineering, and stem cell research.
These discoveries have allowed scientists to test and create better drugs while also minimizing the need for animal testing.
Nelson also made note of a particular success involving a well-known anti-cancer drug named Keytruda made possible through a gamut of ISS-based discoveries.
"It's one thing to develop a drug or therapeutic, but it's another to make sure that [it] is administered in the most effective way — to get it to reach a precise target in the body," he explained.
"[We] were able to develop methods of protein crystal growth that made it possible to administer Keytruda [on Earth] in a new way, by an IV injection."
Keytruda previously required several hours to administer, which puts a burden on patients and healthcare systems. "But in developing the drug for an IV infusion, [it can now] be administered by a doctor in as little as 20 minutes," he said.
In collaboration with the pharmaceutical company Merck, the team is now awaiting approval of the next step for Keytruda: a quick injection.
NASA scientists are also working to develop more sophisticated cancer cell detection methods, which are being incorporated into the astronaut health surveillance program to spot certain cancers earlier and make these measures more widely available.
"What we've learned in part through these focused topic areas and protein crystal growth, nanoparticle drug delivery, and stem cell research, is that these voyages of discovery are not only about humans looking outward to explore new worlds and new destinations outside of Earth, but real world improvements in our understanding of disease here on Earth,” said Michael Roberts, chief scientific officer of the International Space Station National Laboratory and vice president at the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space for cases, which manages the ISS National Lab.
"If beating cancer sounds great, if it sounds daring, if it sounds even impossible," added Nelson. "Just remember, we're NASA. We do moonshots."
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