Super nice pen.
Perhaps nothing but pointing at the 'n'.
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
August 28, 2024
Tulip Nebula and Black Hole Cygnus X-1
When can you see a black hole, a tulip, and a swan all at once? At night – if the timing is right, and if your telescope is pointed in the right direction. The complex and beautiful Tulip Nebula blossoms about 8,000 light-years away toward the constellation of Cygnus the Swan. Ultraviolet radiation from young energetic stars at the edge of the Cygnus OB3 association, including O star HDE 227018, ionizes the atoms and powers the emission from the Tulip Nebula. Stewart Sharpless cataloged this nearly 70 light-years across reddish glowing cloud of interstellar gas and dust in 1959, as Sh2-101. Also in the featured field of view is the black hole Cygnus X-1, which to be a microquasar because it is one of strongest X-ray sources in planet Earth's sky. Blasted by powerful jets from a lurking black hole, its fainter bluish curved shock front is only faintly visible beyond the cosmic Tulip's petals, near the right side of the frame.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Perseverance Kicks off the Crater Rim Campaign!
Aug 27, 2024
Perseverance is officially headed into a new phase of scientific investigation on the Jezero Crater rim!
For the last 2 months, the Perseverance rover has been exploring the Neretva Vallis region of Jezero Crater, where rocks with interesting popcorn-like textures and “leopard spot” patterns have fascinated us all.
Now, the rover has begun its long ascent up the crater rim, and is officially kicking off a new phase of exploration for the mission.
Strategic (longer-term) planning is particularly important for the Mars 2020 mission given the crucial role Perseverance plays in collecting samples for Mars Sample Return, and the Mars 2020 team undertakes this planning in the form of campaigns. Perseverance has now completed four such campaigns— the Crater Floor, Delta Front, Upper Fan and Margin Unit campaigns respectively— making the Crater Rim Campaign next in line.
Given its broad scope and the wide diversity of rocks we expect to encounter and sample along the way, it may be the most ambitious campaign the team has attempted so far.
The team also has less information from orbiter data to go on compared to previous campaigns, because this area of the crater rim does not have the high-resolution, hyperspectral imaging of CRISM that helped inform much of our geological unit distinctions inside the crater.
This means that Mastcam-Z multispectral and SuperCam long-distance imaging will be particularly useful for understanding broadscale mineralogical distinctions between rocks as we traverse the crater rim.
Such imaging has already proved extremely useful in the Neretva Vallis area, where at Alsap Butte we observed rocks that appeared similar to each other in initial imaging, but actually display an Andy-Warhol-esque array of color in multispectral products, indicative of varied mineral signatures.
Our next stop is Dox Castle where Perseverance will investigate the contact between the Margin Unit and the Crater rim, as well as rubbly material that may be our first encounter with deposits generated during the impact that created Jezero crater itself. Later in the campaign, we will investigate other light-toned outcrops that may or may not be similar to those encountered at Bright Angel, as well as rocks thought to be part of the regionally extensive olivine-carbonate-bearing unit, and whose relationship to both Séítah and the Margin Unit remains an interesting story to unravel.
Throughout this next phase of exploration, comparing and contrasting the rocks we see on the rim to both each other and those previously explored in the mission will be an important part of our scientific investigations.
The whole Mars 2020 science team is incredibly excited to be embarking on the next phase of Perseverance’s adventure, and we expect these results, and the samples we collect along the way, to inform our understanding of not just Jezero itself, but the planet Mars as a whole. We can’t wait to share what we find!
https://science.nasa.gov/blog/perseverance-kicks-off-the-crater-rim-campaign/
NASA’s Europa Clipper Gets Set of Super-Size Solar Arrays
Aug 27, 2024
The largest spacecraft NASA has ever built for planetary exploration just got its ‘wings’ — massive solar arrays to power it on the journey to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa.
NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft recently got outfitted with a set of enormous solar arrays at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Each measuring about 46½ feet (14.2 meters) long and about 13½ feet (4.1 meters) high, the arrays are the biggest NASA has ever developed for a planetary mission.
They have to be large so they can soak up as much sunlight as possible during the spacecraft’s investigation of Jupiter’s moon Europa, which is five times farther from the Sun than Earth is.
The arrays have been folded up and secured against the spacecraft’s main body for launch, but when they’re deployed in space, Europa Clipper will span more than 100 feet (30.5 meters) — a few feet longer than a professional basketball court.
The “wings,” as the engineers call them, are so big that they could only be opened one at a time in the clean room of Kennedy’s Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, where teams are readying the spacecraft for its launch period, which opens Oct. 10.
Meanwhile, engineers continue to assess tests conducted on the radiation hardiness of transistors on the spacecraft.
Longevity is key, because the spacecraft will journey more than five years to arrive at the Jupiter system in 2030.
As it orbits the gas giant, the probe will fly by Europa multiple times, using a suite of science instruments to find out whether the ocean underneath its ice shell has conditions that could support life.
Powering those flybys in a region of the solar system that receives only 3% to 4% of the sunlight Earth gets, each solar array is composed of five panels.
Designed and built at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, and Airbus in Leiden, Netherlands, they are much more sensitive than the type of solar arrays used on homes, and the highly efficient spacecraft will make the most of the power they generate.
At Jupiter, Europa Clipper’s arrays will together provide roughly 700 watts of electricity, about what a small microwave oven or a coffee maker needs to operate.
On the spacecraft, batteries will store the power to run all of the electronics, a full payload of science instruments, communications equipment, the computer, and an entire propulsion system that includes 24 engines.
While doing all of that, the arrays must operate in extreme cold.
The hardware’s temperature will plunge to minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 240 degrees Celsius) when in Jupiter’s shadow.
To ensure that the panels can operate in those extremes, engineers tested them in a specialized cryogenic chamber at Liège Space Center in Belgium.
“The spacecraft is cozy. It has heaters and an active thermal loop, which keep it in a much more normal temperature range,” said APL’s Taejoo Lee, the solar array product delivery manager.
“But the solar arrays are exposed to the vacuum of space without any heaters. They’re completely passive, so whatever the environment is, those are the temperatures they get.”
About 90 minutes after launch, the arrays will unfurl from their folded position over the course of about 40 minutes. About two weeks later, six antennas affixed to the arrays will also deploy to their full size.
The antennas belong to the radar instrument, which will search for water within and beneath the moon’s thick ice shell, and they are enormous, unfolding to a length of 57.7 feet (17.6 meters), perpendicular to the arrays.
“At the beginning of the project, we really thought it would be nearly impossible to develop a solar array strong enough to hold these gigantic antennas,” Lee said.
“It was difficult, but the team brought a lot of creativity to the challenge, and we figured it out.”
Europa Clipper’s three main science objectives are to determine the thickness of the moon’s icy shell and its interactions with the ocean below, to investigate its composition, and to characterize its geology.
The mission’s detailed exploration of Europa will help scientists better understand the astrobiological potential for habitable worlds beyond our planet.
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/europa-clipper/nasas-europa-clipper-gets-set-of-super-size-solar-arrays/
Hydrocron: A New Tool for SWOT Time Series Analysis
Aug 27, 2024
The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite collects data on the global ocean and the major water bodies that comprise Earth's freshwater resources.
Over time, these data will make it easier for researchers to analyze how waterbodies are responding to climate change and the impacts of human activity on Earth's freshwater systems.
Yet as the SWOT mission goes on and the volume of data grows, finding, accessing, and analyzing specific files pertaining to a particular body of terrestrial water or water feature may become more challenging.
"As SWOT orbits the planet, it will cross a continent at a particular time and observe the rivers, lakes, reservoirs, and wetlands beneath it.
The data collected during that pass are contained in one data file for each water body type.
Then, SWOT will come around later and do another pass at a slightly different angle and time over that area, and that will be another file," said Victoria McDonald, scientific applications software engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California. "So, if users want to look at one river or one section of a river and see how it has changed over time, they'll need to find all of the individual files at all of the individual times the satellite passed over.
That can be hundreds of files, and users may find it difficult to find and process all of the files they need."
SWOT river data are archived and distributed as zipped shapefiles, which are not cloud optimized. Further, the files are organized by passes of the SWOT satellite over the continents, so each zip file contains data on river features observed at a specific time.
This means that to analyze the way a particular water body has changed over time, users need to extract data for a single feature from a large number of files in the archive.
Hydrocron is powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) using API Gateway, Lambda functions, DynamoDB tables, and SNS notifications.
As data are ingested into the PO.DAAC archive, SWOT shapefiles are unpacked and each river reach (a 10-km section of a river) and node (a point every 200 meters along a reach) is added to a database.
Users can query the API with a feature ID (i.e., the specific ID of the reach or the node that a user is interested in), a time range of interest (both a start and an end date), and their desired data format (GeoJSON or CSV). Users should note that the SWOT satellite may observe lakes and rivers that do not have an ID listed in prior databases. In these cases, hydrology features are added to the Unassigned Lakes data product; Hydrocron does not support unassigned rivers and lakes at this time.
The Hydrocron API can be applied to a variety of applications, said Dr. Catalina Taglialatela, applied science systems engineer at JPL and PO.DAAC.
"Another advantage of the API service is that it offers access to SWOT time series data in ways that apply to multiple use cases," Taglialatela said.
"Through Hydrocron, you can pull data and analyze [the data] programmatically, in code, Jupyter notebooks, pull it into models for data assimilation or for large-data processing, or use [the data] on the backend to support dashboards that offer visualization and data access."
According to McDonald, the involvement of the USGS and other partners in Hydrocron’s development has been a great example of the success that can result from working in a collaborative, open science environment.
"Hydrocron was developed with consultation from the USGS and other stakeholders who realized very early on that they wanted to be involved in a tool like this," she said.
"And so, we've been doing all of our development in the [PO.DAAC] GitHub repository.
Every time we add a new feature or are considering how something is going to work, we write it up in GitHub and get comments from our stakeholders before we make any decisions. It's been a very successful example of open source and open science."
Dr. Cassandra Nickles, applied science systems engineer at PO.DAAC, agreed and added that the collaborative development and adaptability of Hydrocron show that APIs offer an attractive way to make NASA Earth science data more accessible.
"Hydrocron gave us the opportunity to come together as a community and make SWOT data more accessible for so many people," she said.
"We got to design and build this tool and make it open so that other people could replicate it. This could be the future of how the DAACs make data more accessible for people.
Hopefully, SWOT is just the beginning, and we can build something like this for a lot of different data products."
https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/news/hydrocron-new-tool-swot-time-series-analysis
https://github.com/podaac/hydrocron
40 Years Ago: President Reagan Announces Teacher in Space Project
Aug 27, 2024
On Aug. 27, 1984, President Ronald W. Reagan announced the Teacher in Space project as part of NASA’s Space Flight Participant Program to expand the space shuttle experience to a wider set of private citizens who would communicate the experience to the public.
From 11,000 teacher applicants, each of the 50 states and territories selected two nominees for a total of 114.
After meeting with each candidate, a review panel narrowed the field down to 10 finalists.
These 10 underwent interviews and medical examinations. A senior review panel recommended S. Christa McAuliffe as the prime Teacher in Space to fly with the STS-51L crew, with Barbara R. Morgan as her backup.
Tragically, the Jan. 28, 1986, Challenger accident prevented McAuliffe from realizing her dreams of teaching from space.
During a ceremony at the Department of Education recognizing outstanding public secondary schools, President Reagan announced the Teacher in Space project, saying,
It’s long been a goal of our space shuttle to someday carry private citizens in space. Until now, we hadn’t decided who the first citizen passenger would be.
But today, I’m directing NASA to begin a search in all of our elementary and secondary schools, and to choose as the first citizen passenger in the history of our space program, one of America’s finest – a teacher.
When that shuttle takes off, all of America will be reminded of the crucial role that teachers and education play in the life of our nation.
Later that day, NASA Administrator James M. Beggs held a news conference at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., and provided more details, saying that although a teacher would lead off the Space Flight Participant Program, future selections would include journalists, poets, and artists.
NASA released an Announcement of Opportunity on Nov. 8 detailing the requirements for teacher applicants and setting the target launch date of early 1986.
From the approximately 11,000 applications received by the Feb. 1, 1985, deadline, the Council of Chief State School Officers coordinated the selection process, working with state, territorial, and agency review panels.
On May 3, they announced the 114 nominees, two from each U.S. state, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, Departments of Defense and State overseas schools, and Bureau of Indian Affairs schools.
The nominees attended a workshop in Washington, D.C., June 22-27 focused on space education, because even those not selected planned to serve as space ambassadors for NASA.
Each nominee met with the National Review Panel that selected the 10 finalists, announced on July 1.
The 10 finalists spent the week of July 7 at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston. During the week, the finalists underwent medical and psychological examinations, toured JSC’s facilities, and experienced episodes of weightlessness on the KC-135 aircraft.
Following a brief stop at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, the finalists spent July 15-17 in Washington, D.C., undergoing a series of interviews with the NASA Space Flight Participant Committee, who recommended the Teacher in Space candidate and a backup to NASA Administrator Beggs.
cont.
https://www.nasa.gov/history/40-years-ago-president-reagan-announces-teacher-in-space-project/
NASA has to be trolling with the latest cost estimate of its SLS launch tower
8/27/2024, 1:18 PM
NASA's problems with the mobile launch tower that will support a larger version of its Space Launch System rocket are getting worse rather than better.
According to a new report from NASA's inspector general, the estimated cost of the tower, which is a little bit taller than the length of a US football field with its end zones, is now $2.7 billion.
Such a cost is nearly twice the funding it took to build the largest structure in the world, the Burj Khalifa, which is seven times taller.
This is a remarkable explosion in costs as, only five years ago, NASA awarded a contract to the Bechtel engineering firm to build and deliver a second mobile launcher (ML-2) for $383 million, with a due date of March 2023.
That deadline came and went with Bechtel barely beginning to cut metal.
According to NASA's own estimate, the project cost for the tower is now $1.8 billion, with a delivery date of September 2027. However the new report, published Monday, concludes that NASA's estimate is probably too conservative.
"Our analysis indicates costs could be even higher due in part to the significant amount of construction work that remains," states the report, signed by Deputy Inspector General George A. Scott.
NASA commissioned construction of the launch tower—at the express direction of the US Congress—to support a larger version of the Space Launch System rocket known as Block 1B.
This combines the rocket's existing core stage with a larger and more powerful second stage, known as the Exploration Upper Stage, under development by Boeing.
The space agency expects to use this larger version of the SLS rocket beginning with the Artemis IV mission, which is intended to deliver both a crewed Orion spacecraft as well as an element of the Lunar Gateway into orbit around the Moon.
This is to be the second time that astronauts land on the lunar surface as part of the Artemis Program.
The Artemis IV mission has a nominal launch date of 2028, but the new report confirms the widely held assumption in the space community that such a date is unfeasible.
To make a 2028 launch date for this mission, NASA said it needs to have the ML-2 tower completed by November 2026.
Both NASA and the new report agree that there is a zero percent chance of this happening.
Accordingly, if the Artemis IV mission uses the upgraded version of the SLS rocket, it almost certainly will not launch until mid-2029 at the earliest.
Why have the costs and delays grown so much? One reason the report cites is Bechtel's continual underestimation of the scope and complexity of the project.
"Bechtel vastly underestimated the number of labor hours required to complete the ML-2 project and, as a result, has incurred more labor hours than anticipated.
From May 2022 to January 2024, estimated overtime hours doubled to nearly 850,000 hours, reflecting the company’s attempts to meet NASA’s schedule goals.
One of the major takeaways from the new report is that NASA appears to be pretty limited in what it can do to motivate Bechtel to build the mobile launch tower more quickly or at a more reasonable price.
The cost-plus contracting mechanism gives the space agency limited leverage over the contractor beyond withholding award fees.
The report notes that NASA has declined to exercise an option to convert the contract to a fixed-price mechanism.
"While the option officially remains in the contract, NASA officials informed us they do not intend to request a fixed-price proposal from Bechtel," the report states.
"(Exploration Ground Systems) Program and ML-2 project management told us they presume Bechtel would likely provide a cost proposal far beyond NASA’s budgetary capacity to account for the additional risk that comes with a fixed-price contract."
In other words, since NASA did not initially require a fixed price contract, it now sounds like any bid from Bechtel would completely blow a hole in the agency's annual budget.
The spiraling costs of the mobile launch tower have previously been a source of frustration for NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.
In 2022, after cost estimates for the ML-2 structure neared $1 billion, Nelson lashed out at the cost-plus mechanism during testimony to the US Congress.
"I believe that that is the plan that can bring us all the value of competition," Nelson said of fixed-price contracts.
"You get it done with that competitive spirit. You get it done cheaper, and that allows us to move away from what has been a plague on us in the past, which is a cost-plus contract, and move to an existing contractual price."
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/nasas-second-large-launch-tower-has-gotten-stupidly-expensive/
SpaceX Falcon 9 booster catches fire, tips over in landing after Florida launch
August 28, 2024 at 6:16 AM
A SpaceX booster caught fire and tipped over early Wednesday while trying to land on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
A Falcon 9 rocket blasted off at 3:48 a.m. from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, sending another batch of Starlink satellites into orbit.
After the launch, the rocket’s first stage booster caught fire and tipped over while trying to land on the A Shortfall of Gravitas droneship.
“Teams are assessing the booster’s flight data and status. This was the booster’s 23rd launch,” SpaceX said on X.
SpaceX announced the overnight launch after delaying the crewed Polaris Dawn mission because of weather concerns for when the astronauts would need to return to Earth.
This marks the first landing failure for the company since February 2021.
https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2024/08/28/spacex-plans-early-morning-launch-of-starlink-satellites-from-florida-coast/
Auroral substorm sparks stunning northern lights visible at mid-latitudes
August 28, 2024
A coronal mass ejection (CME) struck Earth last night. At first, it appeared weak and failed to trigger an immediate magnetic storm.
But like they say in the iconic fable "The Hare and the Tortoise," slow and steady really does win the race in this case.
The persistent solar wind eventually sparked an aurora substorm and created dazzling northern lights displays down to mid-latitudes.
But how?
"Sometimes slow and steady wins the race! Despite having very low solar winds speeds, sustained -Bz for 8+ hours has allowed for aurora to build and faintly make an appearance down to mid-latitudes," Space weather forecaster and meteorologist Sara Housseal wrote in a post on X.
CMEs are expulsions of plasma and magnetic fields from the sun. They carry electrically charged atoms known as ions.
When CMEs collide with Earth's magnetosphere, they can cause geomagnetic storms.
During such storms, the ions interact with gases in Earth's atmosphere, emitting energy as light.
This light display is called the northern lights, or aurora borealis, in the Northern Hemisphere, and the southern lights, or aurora australis, in the Southern Hemisphere.
Though the CME initially failed to trigger a geomagnetic storm, its persistence and optimum Interplanetary Magnetic Field (IMF) conditions provided the perfect ingredients for an aurora substorm.
When solar wind meets Earth's magnetosphere, it compresses the magnetosphere on Earth's sun-facing side, creating a magnetopause — the boundary where the solar wind meets Earth's magnetic field, according to the European Space Agency (ESA).
This causes most of the incoming particles to flow around Earth, dragging the magnetosphere out into a long tail on the night side of the planet.
When the IMF is orientated southward, it allows for a successful connection of the CME to Earth's magnetic field, effectively funneling solar wind particles into the magnetosphere.
This causes the magnetotail to stretch and "pinch" together in what is known as magnetic reconnection.
During this reconnection event, energy is released. That accelerates particles back toward Earth, which then triggers an auroral substorm.
During auroral substorms, auroras can spring into life by sudden brightening and rapid movement.
The NASA YouTube video below illustrates this magnetic reconnection event that results in auroral substorms:
Space Weather Physicist Tamitha Skov summarized the substorm process nicely in a post on X.
Skov describes it as if the solar storm loads up Earth's magnetic field like pulling back the rubber band of a slingshot.
A substorm occurs when the band springs back.
The "persistent CME effects" sparked moderate G2 geomagnetic storm levels at 10:59 p.m. EDT (0259 GMT) according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center.
Aurora chasers from around the world had their eyes firmly fixed on the skies and were rewarded with some dynamic and colorful displays.
Self-confessed aurora huntress Monika Focht captured these stunning images between 12:30 p.m. and 2:30 a.m. local time (BST) from her garden in Sutherland, Scotland.
"I was outside in my garden many many times, watching the statistics and using aurora apps," Focht told Space.com in an email.
Focht's perseverance paid off when a vibrant northern lights display began to dance overhead.
https://www.space.com/aurora-substorm-northern-lights-aug-2024