They have no idea what is going on.
Pretty cool to see from an outside orbit.
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
July 27, 2024
Saturn at the Moon's Edge
Saturn now rises before midnight in planet Earth's sky. On July 24, the naked-eye planet was in close conjunction, close on the sky, to a waning gibbous Moon. But from some locations on planet Earth the ringed gas giant was occulted, disappearing behind the Moon for about an hour from skies over parts of Asia and Africa. Because the Moon and bright planets wander through the sky near the ecliptic plane, such occultation events are not uncommon, but they can be dramatic. In this telescopic view from Nanjing, Jiangsu, China, Saturn is caught moments before its disappearance behind the lunar disk. The snapshot gives the illusion that Saturn hangs just above Glushko crater, a 43 kilometer diameter, young, ray crater near the Moon's western edge. Of course, the Moon is 400 thousand kilometers away, compared to Saturn's distance of 1.4 billion kilometers.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html?
Hubble Images a Classic Spiral
Jul 26, 2024
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image treats viewers to a wonderfully detailed snapshot of the spiral galaxy NGC 3430 that lies 100 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Leo Minor.
Several other galaxies, located relatively nearby to this one, are just beyond the frame of this image; one is close enough that gravitational interaction is driving some star formation in NGC 3430 — visible as bright-blue patches near to but outside of the galaxy’s main spiral structure.
This fine example of a galactic spiral holds a bright core from which a pinwheel array of arms appears to radiate outward.
Dark dust lanes and bright star-forming regions help define these spiral arms.
NGC 3430’s distinct shape may be one reason why astronomer Edwin Hubble used to it to help define his classification of galaxies.
Namesake of the Hubble Space Telescope, Edwin Hubble authored a paper in 1926 that outlined the classification of some four hundred galaxies by their appearance — as either spiral, barred spiral, lenticular, elliptical, or irregular.
This straightforward typology proved extremely influential, and the detailed schemes astronomers use today are still based on Edwin Hubble’s work.
NGC 3430 itself is a spiral lacking a central bar with open, clearly defined arms — classified today as an SAc galaxy.
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/hubble-images-a-classic-spiral/
NASA Returns to Arctic Studying Summer Sea Ice Melt
Jul 26, 2024
What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic, and a new NASA mission is helping improve data modeling and increasing our understanding of Earth’s rapidly changing climate.
Changing ice, ocean, and atmospheric conditions in the northernmost part of Earth have a large impact on the entire planet. That’s because the Arctic region acts like Earth’s air conditioner.
Much of the Sun’s energy is transported from tropical regions of our planet by winds and weather systems into the Arctic where it is then lost to space. This process helps cool the planet.
The NASA-sponsored Arctic Radiation Cloud Aerosol Surface Interaction Experiment (ARCSIX) mission is flying three aircraft over the Arctic Ocean north of Greenland to study these processes.
The aircraft are equipped with instruments to gather observations of surface sea ice, clouds, and aerosol particles, which affect the Arctic energy budget and cloud properties.
The energy budget is the balance between the energy that Earth receives from the Sun and the energy the Earth loses to outer space.
“More sea ice makes that air conditioning effect more efficient. Less sea ice lessens the Arctic’s cooling effect,” says Patrick Taylor, a climate scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.
“Over the last 40 years, The Arctic has lost a significant amount of sea ice making the Arctic warm faster.
As the Arctic warms and sea ice melts, it can cause ripple effects that impact weather conditions thousands of miles away, how fast our seas are rising, and how much flooding we get in our neighborhoods.”
The first series of flights took place in May and June as the seasonal melting of ice started. Flights began again on July 24 during the summer season, when sea ice melting is at its most intense.
“We can’t do this kind of Arctic science without having two campaigns,” said Taylor, the deputy science lead for ARCSIX. “The sea ice surface in the spring was very bright white and snow covered.
We saw some breaks in the ice. What we will see in the second campaign is less sea ice and sea ice that is bare, with no snow.
It will be covered with all kinds of melt ponds – pooling water on top of the ice – that changes the way the ice interacts with sunlight and potentially changes how the ice interacts with the atmosphere and clouds above.”
Sea ice and the snow on top of the ice insulate the ocean from the atmosphere, reflecting the Sun’s radiation back towards space, and helping to cool the planet.
Less sea ice and darker surfaces result in more of the Sun’s radiation being absorbed at the surface or trapped between the surface and the clouds.
Understanding this relationship, and the role clouds play in the system, will help scientists improve satellite data and better predict future changes in the Arctic climate.
“This unique team of pilots, engineers, scientists, and aircraft can only be done by leveraging expertise from multiple NASA centers and our partners,” said Linette Boisvert, cryosphere lead for the mission from NASA’s Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
“We gathered great data of the snow and ice pre-melt and at the onset of melt. I can’t wait to see the changes at the height of melt as we measure the same areas covered with melt ponds.”
NASA partnered with the University of Colorado Boulder for the ARCSIX mission, and the research team found some surprises in their early data analysis from the spring campaign.
One potential discovery is something Taylor is calling a “sea ice sandwich”, when a younger layer of sea ice is caught in between two layers of older sea ice.
Scientists also found more drizzle within the clouds than expected. Both observations will need further investigating once the data is fully processed.
“A volcano erupted in Iceland, and we believe the volcanic aerosol plume was indicated by our models four days later,” Taylor said.
“Common scientific knowledge tells us volcanic particles, like ash and sulfate, would have already been removed from the atmosphere.
More work needs to be done, but our initial results suggest these particles might live in the atmosphere much longer than previously thought.”
Previous studies suggest that aerosol particles in clouds can influence sea ice melt. Data collected during ARCSIX’s spring flights showed the Arctic atmosphere had several aerosol particle layers, including wildfire smoke, pollution, and dust transported from Asia and North America.
https://www.nasa.gov/earth/nasa-returns-to-arctic-studying-summer-sea-ice-melt/
NASA astronauts hold their own Summer Olympics in space
July 26, 2024
Excitement about the start of the 2024 Summer Olympics extends out into space.
The six NASA astronauts currently living aboard the International Space Station (ISS) held their own mini-Olympics to mark the start of the games, which are being held in Paris and other sites around France.
We get a glimpse at the spaceflyers' lighthearted efforts in a two-minute video, which NASA released today (July 26).
The action starts with the passing of an Olympic torch — a mock one, of course, as fires are a serious no-no on the ISS — from Jeanette Epps to Mike Barratt to Suni Williams to Tracy Caldwell Dyson, then finally to Butch Wilmore, who's in the station's Cupola, with Earth visible in the background.
The astronauts then gear up for their events. Epps and Williams shake out their arms, for example.
Wilmore stretches his upper body, then hydrates — by sucking in a water globule floating near his head.
And then the orbital games begin. Barratt hurls a makeshift discus and Wilmore shotputs a ball of duct tape.
Williams and Matthew Dominick (the sixth NASA astronaut living off-Earth at the moment) do some gymnastics, and Epps sprints down an ISS corridor.
Caldwell Dyson does some powerlifting, raising a bar that Wilmore and Barratt are clutching off the "ground."
It's all very playful, of course. But the astronauts capped things off by sending a sincere message to the athletes of the 23rd Olympiad.
"Over the past few days on the International Space Station, we've had an absolute blast pretending to be Olympic athletes," Dominick says at the end of the video, with the other five NASA astronauts flanking him.
"We, of course, have had the benefits of weightlessness," he added. "We can't imagine how hard this must be, to be such a world-class athlete doing your sports under actual gravity.
So from all of us aboard the International Space Station to every single athlete in the Olympic Games, godspeed!"
The six NASA astronauts aren't the only people living on the ISS at the moment; it also houses Russian cosmonauts Nikolai Chub, Alexander Grebenken and Oleg Kononenko, who commands the orbiting lab's current Expedition 71 mission.
All of these spaceflyers are serving the typical six-month ISS stint except Williams and Wilmore, who arrived aboard Boeing's new Starliner capsule on June 6 for a planned weeklong stay.
https://www.space.com/nasa-astronauts-summer-olympics-2024-iss-video