NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

August 3, 2024

Glory and Fog Bow

On a road trip up Mount Uludağ in Bursa province, Turkey these motorcyclists found themselves above low clouds and fog in late June. With the bright Sun directly behind them, the view down the side of the great mountain revealed a beautiful, atmospheric glory and fog bow. Known to some as the heiligenschein or the Specter of the Brocken, a glory can also sometimes be seen from airplanes or even high buildings. It often appears to be a dark giant surrounded by a bright halo. Of course the dark giant is just the shadow of the observer (90MB video) cast opposite the Sun. The clouds and fog are composed of very small water droplets, smaller than rain drops, that refract and reflect sunlight to create the glory's colorful halo and this more extensive fog bow.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html?

Asteroid worth $10,000 quadrillion is now visible from Earth

Aug 3, 2024

A NASA spacecraft is still on its way to explore an ultra-valuable, metal-rich asteroid.

However, you don't have to wait for the space agency to beam back pictures of the so-called "golden asteroid" in a few years to see it.

Per Astronomy Magazine, Asteroid 16 Psyche will reach opposition—opposite to the Sun in our sky—at 1 a.m. CT on Aug. 6.

It will be located among the stars in northern Capricornus glowing at a magnitude of 9.6.

You can find Psyche in the southwestern sky in the early morning hours leading up to dawn, but you'll need a telescope to do so.

Due to its high metal content, scientists believe Psyche could be the leftover metallic core of a failed planet, known as a planetesimal.

Located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the irregular, potato-shaped rock measures 173 miles across, and 144 miles long, with a surface area of 64,000 miles.

It takes about five Earth years to complete one orbit of the Sun and takes just over four hours to rotate on its axis.

The celestial body is named for the Greek goddess of the soul. Since it was the 16th asteroid to be discovered, it is sometimes referred to as 16 Psyche.

The enormous asteroid has been estimated to be worth $10,000 quadrillion—more than the entire economy on our planet—due to the high quantities of precious metals it contains, including gold, iron and nickel.

The Psyche mission launched on Oct. 13, 2023 to study the unique metal-rich space rock. It marks the first mission to a world rich in metal, rather than rock or ice.

Exploration of the asteroid could show how Earth's core and the other cores of terrestrial planets came to be.

In NASA's latest update on the mission in May, the spacecraft was more than 190 million miles away and moving at a clip of 23 miles per second, according to the space agency.

It is expected to arrive at the asteroid in August 2029.

https://www.chron.com/news/space/article/golden-asteroid-visible-19615475.php

MESSENGER – From Setbacks to Success

Aug 02, 2024

The excerpts below are taken from Discovery Program oral history interviews conducted in 2009 by Dr. Susan Niebur and tell the story of the hurdles the MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) mission team faced with the technical requirements of visiting Mercury, budget challenges, and schedule impacts —all while keeping their mission goals in mind on the way to launch.

The MESSENGER mission followed a long road from conception to launch with multiple detours and obstacles along the way.

First conceived by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) after NASA’s 1996 Discovery Program Announcement of Opportunity, the mission to Mercury proposal, if accepted, would be the first spacecraft to visit the planet since Mariner 10’s flybys in 1974.

A critical step for APL was finding the right principal investigator (PI) to lead the mission.

cont.

https://www.chron.com/news/space/article/golden-asteroid-visible-19615475.php

>>21344310

NASA Invites Media, Public to Attend Deep Space Food Challenge Finale

Aug 02, 2024

NASA invites the media and public to explore the nexus of space and food innovation at the agency’s Deep Space Food Challenge symposium and winners’ announcement at the Nationwide and Ohio Farm Bureau 4-H Center in Columbus, Ohio, on Friday, Aug. 16.

In 2019, NASA and the CSA (Canadian Space Agency) started the Deep Space Food Challenge, a multi-year international effort to develop sustainable food systems for long-duration habitation in space including the Moon and Mars.

Since Phase 1 of the challenge opened in 2021, more than 300 teams from 32 countries have developed innovative food system designs. On Aug. 16, NASA will announce the final Phase 3 winners and recognize the shared global effort.

NASA will award up to $1.5 million during the awards ceremony, totaling the prize purse for this three-year competition at $3 million. International teams also will be recognized for their achievements.

“Advanced food systems also benefit life on Earth,” said Kim Krome-Sieja, acting program manager of NASA Centennial Challenges at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

“Solutions from this challenge could enable new avenues for food production around the world, especially in extreme environments, resource-scarce regions, and in locations where disasters disrupt critical infrastructure.”

Media also may request attendance for activities on Thursday, Aug. 15, including private tours, networking, knowledge sharing, and culinary experiences.

Interested media need to RSVP by 3 p.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 12, to Lane Figueroa at lane.e.figueroa@nasa.gov.

The Methuselah Foundation, NASA’s partner in the Deep Space Food Challenge, is hosting the event in coordination with the Ohio State University College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences and NASA Centennial Challenges.

“Our Phase 2 winners’ event in Brooklyn, New York, was an incredible display of innovation, partnership, and collaboration across NASA, industry, and academia,” said Angela Herblet, challenge manager of the Deep Space Food Challenge and program analyst of NASA Centennial Challenges at NASA Marshall.

“I’m looking forward to celebrating these brilliant Phase 3 finalists and underscoring the giant leaps they’ve made toward creating sustainable, regenerative food production systems.”

The event will feature a meet and greet with the Phase 3 finalists, symposium panels, and live demonstrations of the finalists’ food production technologies. Attendees also will have the opportunity to meet the crew of Ohio State students called “Simunauts,” who managed operations of the technologies during the eight-week demonstration and testing period.

“The Prizes, Challenges, and Crowdsourcing team is excited to welcome media, stakeholders, and the public to our event in Columbus,” said Amy Kaminski, program executive for NASA’s Prizes, Challenges, and Crowdsourcing at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

“These finalists have worked diligently for three years to develop their diverse, innovative food systems, and I’m excited to see how their technologies may impact NASA’s future deep space missions.”

The awards ceremony also will livestream on Marshall Space Flight Center’s YouTube channel and NASA Prize’s Facebook page.

As a NASA Centennial Challenge, the Deep Space Food Challenge is a coordinated effort between NASA and CSA for the benefit of all.

Subject matter experts at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida support the competition. N

ASA’s Centennial Challenges are part of the Prizes, Challenges, and Crowdsourcing program within NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate and managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. 

The Methuselah Foundation, in partnership with NASA, oversees the competitors.

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-invites-media-public-to-attend-deep-space-food-challenge-finale/

https://www.deepspacefoodchallenge.org/symposium

>>21344069

It's Sounding Like Boeing's Starliner May Have Completely Failed

Aug 2, 12:52 PM EDT

Orbit Error

It looks like NASA officials might be seeing the writing on the wall for the very troubled Boeing Starliner, which has marooned two astronauts up in space for almost two months due to technical issues.

An unnamed "informed" source told Ars Technica that there's a greater than 50 percent probability that the stranded astronauts will end up leaving the International Space Station on a SpaceX Dragon capsule, with another unnamed person telling the news outlet that the scenario is highly likely.

NASA officials are more cagey about what's happening on the record, a marked contrast from previous weeks when they expressed confidence in the Starliner's ability to safely bring back the astronauts.

"NASA is evaluating all options for the return of agency astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams from the International Space Station as safely as possible," NASA spokesperson Josh Finch told Ars.

"No decisions have been made and the agency will continue to provide updates on its planning."

The Starliner project has been cursed from the beginning, with delays and hardware issues during the development and production of the capsule, which has seen Boeing eating something like $1.6 billion in losses.

Despite technical troubles before the launch, NASA went ahead with Starliner's first crewed mission in June.

While on approach towards the space station, Starliner experienced helium leaks and issues with its thrusters, forcing NASA and Boeing to delay its return back home with the astronauts so that engineers back on the ground could troubleshoot the problems.

Fess Up

Many signs are now pointing towards SpaceX rescuing the stranded astronauts, according to Ars.

These signs include the space agency giving more than a quarter million dollars to SpaceX for a "SPECIAL STUDY FOR EMERGENCY RESPONSE," and SpaceX actively training for the likely situation of the company sending a Dragon capsule to the space station to bring the astronauts home.

If SpaceX does get the green light, expect the Starliner project to be shoved into the proverbial dumpster, according to Ars' analysis.

It would be a bad look all around, because it would mean the American government had funneled a total of $5.8 billion into malfunctioning junk.

If this scenario happens, with Starliner not deemed safe enough for human travel, we hope politicians and others investigate what went wrong, given that SpaceX has managed to build the immensely more reliable Dragon capsule at 50 percent less cost than Boeing's spacecraft.

What kind of oversight did NASA bring to the Starliner program during its development and production process?

That's just one hard question among many.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/signs-boeing-starliner-completely-failed

>>21344226

NG-21 Mission

SpaceX is targeting Sunday, August 4 for Falcon 9’s launch of Northrop Grumman’s 21st Cygnus mission (NG-21) to the International Space Station from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The instantaneous launch window is at 11:02 a.m. ET.

A live webcast of this mission will begin about 20 minutes prior to liftoff, which you can watch here and on X @SpaceX.

This is the tenth flight of the first stage booster supporting this mission, which previously launched Ax-2, Euclid, Ax-3, CRS-30, SES ASTRA 1P, and four Starlink missions. Following stage separation, Falcon 9 will land on Landing Zone 1 (LZ-1) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

Aboard the Cygnus spacecraft are tests of water recovery technology, a process to produce stem cells in microgravity, studies of the effects of spaceflight on microorganism DNA, liver tissue growth, and live science demonstrations for students.

https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=ng-21

Hubble Spies a Diminutive Galaxy

Aug 02, 2024

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals the subtle glow of the galaxy named IC 3430, located 45 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo.

This dwarf elliptical galaxy is part of the Virgo cluster, a rich collection of galaxies both large and small, many of which are very similar in type to this diminutive galaxy.

Like its larger elliptical cousins, IC 3430 has a smooth, oval shape lacking any recognizable features like arms or bars, and is missing much of the gas needed to form many new stars.

Interestingly, IC 3430 does feature a core of hot, massive blue stars —an uncommon sight in elliptical galaxies — that indicates recent star-forming activity.

Astronomers think that pressure from the galaxy ploughing through gas within the Virgo cluster ignited what gas IC 3430 had in its core to form the newer stars.

Dwarf galaxies are really just galaxies with fewer stars, usually less than a billion, but that is often enough for them to reproduce, in miniature, the same forms as larger galaxies.

There are dwarf elliptical galaxies like IC 3430, dwarf irregular galaxies, dwarf spheroidal galaxies, and even dwarf spiral galaxies!

https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/hubble-spies-a-diminutive-galaxy/

Suicide bombing in Somalia kills 32 at popular beach hotel

Aug 03, 2024

At least 32 people were killed and more than 60 injured when a suicide bomb detonated at a popular beach hotel in Somalia’s capital of Mogadishu on Friday night, police said.

The attack was claimed by the Islamic militant group al-Shabaab, an affiliate of al-Qaeda that operates in East Africa and has waged an insurgency against Somalia’s government for some 17 years.

It was quickly condemned by the U.S. and the European Union, among others.

Somali Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre and President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud met Saturday with security agencies, according to local media.

Such attacks are “a direct threat to the very fabric of our nation,” the premier said in a statement.

The Associated Press reported that an attacker was seen wearing an explosives-laden vest moments before the man blew himself up next to the hotel.

Police said there were six attackers in all, including the bomber and gunmen, who were successfully “neutralized” after engaging in skirmishes.

Ahmed Hashi, a police officer at the scene at Lido Beach, told Bloomberg News on Saturday that a car on site “contains one of the most powerful explosives ever.”

The area remains cordoned off.

“This brutal attack at Lido Beach against civilians underlines yet again al-Shabab’s barbarity towards their own compatriots,” the EU’s diplomatic service said in a statement.

The US embassy in Mogadishu said its commitment to supporting efforts to defeat the terror group was “unwavering.”

Hassan, Somalia’s president, vowed to escalate the fight against al-Shabaab when he took office in 2022, as the militant group threatened to broaden attacks into Ethiopia and carry out more in Kenya.

Somalia has been battling the insurgency since 2006 and suffers regular blasts in the capital and elsewhere.

In July, a car bombing killed five people who had gathered in Mogadishu to watch the finals of the European soccer championship.

The Lido Beach area has been targeted by al-Shabaab-linked militants in the past, including in 2023, when several people were killed after an hours-long siege.

Separately, at least seven people were killed when a minibus was hit by a roadside bomb in the Middle Shabelle region, northeast of Mogadishu, on Saturday.

https://nationalpost.com/news/suicide-bombing-in-somalia-kills-32-at-popular-beach-hotel

How many galaxies are in the universe?

August 3, 2024

The Milky Way is just a speck in a universe filled with an untold number of galaxies. But if we had to take an educated guess, how many galaxies are in the universe?

That sounds like a simple question, but it's anything but. The first problem is that even with our most powerful telescopes, we can see only a tiny fraction of the universe.

"The observable universe is only that part of the universe from which the light has had time to reach us," astrophysicist Kai Noeske, now outreach officer at the European Space Agency, told Live Science.

The universe is 13.8 billion years old, but the observable universe stretches more than 13.8 light-years in every direction.

That's because the universe is expanding and light got a head start early on, when the universe was smaller. "Now, the total size in each direction is about 46 billion light-years," Noeske said.

That's much smaller than even our smallest estimates of the entire universe. "We see at most 3% of the universe," Pamela Gay, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, told Live Science.

The second problem is that there are so many galaxies that we can only make estimates of the total number based on what we can observe in small regions of the universe.

"You look at a small patch of the sky, and you count everything in that small patch and then multiply over the size of the sky," Gay said.

But even that requires a cutoff. "What do we define [as] a galaxy?" Noeske said.

"We have really giant galaxies that have to have a factor of 10 more" the mass of our galaxy, "and we have a lot of small galaxies, from lower-mass galaxies that have about 10 times less mass … down all the way to dwarf galaxies."

At some point, scientists need to define a minimum mass for a galaxy to make estimates possible.

"If we set a mass cutoff and try to make this conservative, like a million solar masses, we end up with an average number of galaxies in the universe from the beginning to today of about 1 to 2 trillion," Noeske said.

Scientists think there were more galaxies earlier in the universe's history than there are today, which is why galaxy estimates are an average over time.

"But those results come from the Hubble [telescope] — the James Webb Space Telescope is starting to speak to these results — which are near Earth, inside of our solar system, and are limited on what they can see by all the stuff in our solar system that adds light to the sky," Gay said.

"We do have one spacecraft with a camera that has gotten beyond all the garbage within our solar system, and that's the New Horizons spacecraft."

A 2021 study used the camera aboard New Horizons to measure the total amount of light in various patches of sky and estimated how many galaxies would be needed to create that much light.

"And suddenly, as they're outside of all the light sources in our solar system, they realize we don't need as many galaxies as we thought," Gay said.

"And so their estimates put us at, like, 200 billion, maybe even 100 billion galaxies in the visible universe.

"So somewhere between 2 trillion galaxies at the top edge and 100 billion at the lower edge is the number of galaxies in our observable universe," she said.

If you assume that's 3% — at most — of our universe, you can multiply that range of galaxies to get the total number of galaxies in the universe.

If we're seeing less of the universe than we think, there will be a smaller total number of galaxies.

But considering we don't actually know the size of the universe, those estimates are murky. "If it's an infinite universe, you're going to have infinite galaxies," Gay said.

https://www.livescience.com/space/how-many-galaxies-are-in-the-universe