NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

November 24, 2024

Journey to the Center of the Galaxy

What lies at the center of our galaxy? In Jules Verne's science fiction classic, A Journey to the Center of the Earth, Professor Liedenbrock and his fellow explorers encounter many strange and exciting wonders. Astronomers already know of some of the bizarre objects that exist at our Galactic Center, including vast cosmic dust clouds, bright star clusters, swirling rings of gas, and even a supermassive black hole. Much of the Galactic Center is shielded from our view in visible light by the intervening dust and gas, but it can be explored using other forms of electromagnetic radiation. The featured video is actually a digital zoom into the Milky Way's center which starts by utilizing visible light images from the Digitized Sky Survey. As the movie proceeds, the light shown shifts to dust-penetrating infrared and highlights gas clouds that were recently discovered in 2013 to be falling toward the central black hole.

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

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TrumpPointingAtTheSky.png

https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=michael+salla&ref=nav_sb_noss_l_13

The underground Victorian reservoir bursting back to life as a pioneering space centre

12:56, 24 NOV 2024

An underground Victorian reservoir left abandoned for 40 years is about to burst back into life thanks to a project first started by a group of Nottinghamshire ex-miners.

The site was first built in response to a mass cholera outbreak way back in 1886 but after becoming redundant as a source of clean water, the brick structure was left dormant for decades.

Nearly 140 years on from first being built, around 20,000 visitors a year are now expected to wander through the underground reservoir following a multi-million pound restoration.

The project has seen a pioneering planetarium being built on top of the reservoir, based on Coxmoor Road in Sutton-in-Ashfield.

The main feature of the new Planetarium and Science Discovery Centre is a 59-seater room where visitors will be able to watch 4K digital images of space on a 10 metre screen surrounding a dome-shaped structure.

The reservoir itself has been transformed into an exhibition space, with the vast majority of its original structure remaining a key part of the new centre.

Ahead of the official opening on Monday (November 25), Nottinghamshire Live was given a tour of the brand new facility.

"I know that I'll never work on anything like this again in my career," says Stephen Spiegelhalter, who has been the project manager on behalf of G F Tomlinson.

"This all began with a group of ex-miners who came together with a dream to open an observatory, which is an amazing thing in itself."

An advert was placed in the local paper in 1969 asking for people who had an interest in astronomy to come forward.

A small group eventually formed with a dream to open an observatory in Nottinghamshire.

Having purchased land from Coxmoor Golf Club, ground was finally broken in 1972 and the Sherwood Observatory opened to members from 1986.

The observatory building features a huge Newtonian telescope and membership steadily grew over the decades.

The Mansfield & Sutton Astronomical Society eventually set its sights on land next door housing the abandoned underground reservoir, eventually purchasing the site in 2014.

Funding to turn the site into a planetarium trickled in over the years, with the most significant contributions being a combined £5 million from bids to government that the society worked on with Ashfield District Council.

Work was therefore able to get underway in August 2023 and despite the challenges inherent in transforming an abandoned Victorian building, the project is being delivered on time and on budget.

"We lost about five weeks worth of progress due to the weather at one stage", says Mr Spiegelhalter.

"But we've worked weekends and overtime to catch up and so we're still going to be delivering the project on time."

Leading on the project from the Mansfield & Sutton Astronomical Society has been Dr Steve Wallace. Looking around the completed site, Dr Wallace said:

"This is a testament to the dedication of all our volunteers. I'm only a volunteer myself, but something like this really sucks you in and I've ended up working full-time on it.

"This is going to be really unique because we have the existing observatory and then we'll have the planetarium next door, so people will be able to see images of space on the big screen and then come next door and see the night sky with the naked eye.

I don't think anywhere else in the country has that."

The digital images projected on the giant planetarium screen will be created using data from agencies including NASA, with the software provided by the French-based firm RSA Cosmos.

As well as being able to pop next door to the observatory to see space with the naked eye, the view from that telescope can also be broadcast live onto the planetarium's screen.

"Just imagine what it is going to be like for children watching images of a 3D environment in space on a screen in 4K", says Mr Spiegelhalter.

Between the opening day and Christmas, 50 screenings have already been scheduled and prices will be £7.50 for an adult and £6 for a child.

Two people are already employed by the planetarium, one of whom previously worked at the National Space Centre, and the number of employees could grow next year.

The observatory itself currently gets around 3,000 visitors a year but once the planetarium opens, it is thought that the whole site could end up welcoming 20,000 visitors annually.

https://www.nottinghampost.com/news/local-news/underground-victorian-reservoir-bursting-back-9736080

https://discoverashfield.co.uk/regeneration/sherwood-observatory-science-discovery-centre-and-planetarium

This Little-Known Space Company Forecasts Parabolic Hypergrowth

Nov 24, 2024 at 7:07AM

BlackSky Technology (BKSY 3.37%) missed analyst forecasts for both sales and earnings earlier this month, but investors didn't seem to mind very much.

Shares of the commercial spy satellite operator actually closed out last week above $8, gaining about 9% from their pre-earnings price.

Considering that this space stock missed analyst sales forecasts by more than 18% (sales were $22.5 million rather than the $27.5 million forecast), and missed on earnings, too (losing $0.66 per share instead of just $0.65), investors' enthusiasm for the stock is a little surprising.

Maybe more than a little, considering the stock has been relatively unpopular among space investors since conducting a reverse stock split in September.

Ordinarily, the math of "reverse split plus earnings miss equals rising stock price" wouldn't seem to add up. So why is BlackSky stock on the rise these days?

BlackSky by the numbers

Let's take a closer look at the third-quarter numbers and see if we can find out.

Year to date, management pointed out, sales are up 22% at BlackSky. But Q3 in particular seems to have been a weak sales quarter in a strong sales year.

Quarterly sales came in just 6% above Q3 2023 levels. (And on the bottom line, BlackSky flipped from a Q3 2023 profit to a Q3 2024 loss.)

But not to worry, says management. While BlackSky may have billed only $22.5 million in revenue in Q3, it signed multiple "multi-year contract bookings" and they're worth "up to $780 million" in total, in future revenue.

Two of these contracts bear special mention. For "up to" $290 million spread over five years, BlackSky will "monitor global economic and environmental activity and military capability," including "objects of interest such as aircraft, ships, vehicles, and shipping containers," for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA).

BlackSky also received an indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract to support NASA Earth observation research missions through November 2028, and this one is worth "up to" $476 million.

Add them up, and these two contracts account for $766 million of the $780 million in work BlackSky seems to be saying it won in the quarter.

For a company that collected just $107 million in revenue over the past year, that would qualify as real hypergrowth – a parabolic uptick in sales.

Even spread out over five years, $766 million works out to an extra $153 million in annual sales – more than 140% growth.

While BlackSky's descriptions of its contract wins sound promising, the company was a bit vague on the details, and about one detail in particular.

Specifically: If you examine the contract awards themselves, rather than just the press releases that BlackSky put out about them, or the even more terse summaries in the earnings release, it turns out that both of these contracts were awarded to multiple winners, of which BlackSky was only one.

Put another way, BlackSky didn't win hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue – but merely the right to bid against others for the work.

For example, the $290 million NGA award will be divided up among 10 separate winners, including heavyweights such as Airbus, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Maxar Intelligence.

Similarly, NASA's gigantic $476 million "Commercial SmallSat Data Acquisition Program On-Ramp Multiple Award contract" names seven other winners in addition to BlackSky.

To win a share of the loot, BlackSky must beat out heavyweights such as MDA Geospatial, Planet Labs, and Teledyne.

BlackSky will grow, but a lot slower than "hyper"

Now, there's every reason to hope BlackSky will be able to successfully bid for and receive a share of the work under both these awards.

In particular, the company noted that it's already won at least one NGA award in the past (worth $60 million).

But investors expecting BlackSky to get all $766 million of the monies on offer are in for a rude surprise.

BlackSky getting all the money on offer, I fear, is probably a pipe dream.

As only one among 10 companies bidding on the NGA contract, and one of eight bidding on the NASA contract, BlackSky's actual winnings will almost certainly end up a small fraction of the total – and could be nothing at all.

And as for BlackSky turning an actual profit, even the most optimistic analysts don't see that happening before 2027 at the earliest.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/11/24/space-company-forecasts-parabolic-hypergrowth/

https://www.space.com/space-exploration/missions/how-a-mini-team-of-nasa-archivists-is-restoring-astronomical-history

How a mini-team of NASA archivists is restoring astronomical history

November 23, 2024

Precious data from space missions, going back decades, is being carefully restored and archived by scientists at NASA's Space Science Date Coordinated Archive, allowing researchers today to make new discoveries by delving into the history books.

"What's surprising is how much of this information is either lost or at least not in a condition that anybody can use it in," planetary scientist David Williams of the National Space Science Data Center Archive (NSSDCA) told Space.com.

"We've got tons of photography, reels of film from various missions, a lot of microfilm and microfiche. We're slowly working through it"

The detective work required to hunt through archives, basements and forgotten store-rooms at institutions all across the United States to find and restore this old data couldn't be more important; the unearthed data can still be used by researchers today to help guide missions of the future.

For instance, take the team working on NASA's DAVINCI (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging) mission, which will begin its trip to Venus in the early 2030s.

It will be the first dedicated, American-led Venusian mission since the 1990s (Europe and Japan have both been back to Venus since then).

One of its targets on the carbon-dioxide enshrouded planet is a continent-sized plateau called Alpha Regio, which is a gigantic tessera of deformed surface features linked to volcanism and possibly impacts.

So, to know what DAVINCI should look for on Alpha Regio, the mission's team of scientists has gone back to the past, applying modern-day analysis and machine-learning techniques to data from NASA's Magellan Venus mission from the early 1990s, coupled with some archive Arecibo radar data.

The goal is to build a new map of Alpha Regio and identify puzzling geological structures on the tessera that may have gone unnoticed. In a similar use of old data, earlier this year, researchers found evidence for volcanic activity in Magellan data from 1990 to 1992.

Meet the archivists

None of this old data would be available and in a usable condition if it were not for the hard work of the team at the NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive (NSSDCA) at the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center.

The NSSDCA's job is to restore and digitize data from all interplanetary space missions. Together, the crew hunts for lost data from some of NASA's earliest missions, including the Apollo missions to the moon.

(Other institutions are responsible for the data from other types of missions; for instance the Space Telescope Science Institute, which manages the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, is also tasked with archiving the data from the observatories.)

As the head of the NSSDCA, David Williams probably has one of the best jobs at NASA. His role isn't just to be an archivist; it's also to play detective, figuring out where missing data might be lurking, then working out what that data is telling us and how it should be formatted so that it can be useful to future generations of astronomers.

"I love that aspect of it," he enthused in an interview with Space.com. "Trying to dig up the data and figure something out is when I have the most fun here."

Prior to about the mid- to late-1980s, there were no rules on how to archive precious astronomical data collected by space missions. In fact, some researchers didn't even bother to archive their data at all.

By the late 1980s, the authorities at NASA's Planetary Data System (PDS), which is the one-stop shop for planetary science data, flexed their muscles and began insisting on an archival process, even to the point of denying funding to researchers who didn't archive their data.

The job of making sure things are archived properly falls to Williams and the NSSDCA.

"Now you know that if there's been a mission since Magellan [from 1989] or thereabouts, the data are going to be well documented and complete with very few exceptions," he said.

However, for missions before then, the availability and quality of the data can be a crapshoot.

"Back even to the mid-80s really, there were no systematic rules about archiving data," said Williams. "This is something that I learned big time when I started doing this."

Now, when applying for funding, researchers must not only submit all their raw data, but also the documentation that explains what the data is measuring and how it should be displayed.

Researchers must undergo a "data review," where Williams and his colleagues scrutinize the data and documentation and make sure they have everything they need — anything that isn't sufficiently laid out gets sent back to the researchers to be fixed.

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Still missing data

There's still lots of data from experiments and missions from before this rigorous validation scheme was introduced that just hasn't been archived, has incomplete documentation, or is even simply missing, perhaps permanently.

"The documentation is just as important as the data. We used to get boxes of tapes with a cover letter, 'here's all the data from such-and-such mission,' and we'd wonder:

'What are we supposed to do with this?'" said Williams. "For the really old stuff, there's not even anyone to talk to about it, so you have to find out yourself how the experiment worked."

Today everything is digitized and backed-up, but the original source — be it a print-out, microfilm or nine-track tape — is retained, contained in an "archive information packet" that is basically just a wrapper with the data's ID.

Because boxes of print-outs can take up lots of room, back in the old days, many of those print-outs were transferred to microfilm and microfiche (transparencies containing scaled-down images of printed items) , but now a lot of the NSSDCA staff's time is spent digitizing these microfilms, and, in the process, have discovered alarming gaps and vulnerabilities in the archive.

"About 15 years ago, we got a request from someone for the data from the Viking biology experiment," said Williams.

This was an experiment on the two Viking landers from 1976 that was designed to test samples of Martian dirt for the presence of microbial life.

Williams believed that all the biology experiment data was on microfilm, but when he sat down in the archive to sift through the documentation pertaining to the experiment to try and find the requested data, he couldn't find it.

Perhaps it had been discarded, or gone bad, mused Williams.

"And I realized that I'm sitting there with these boxes of microfilm, and they are the only thing that's left from that Viking biology experiment," he said.

"If something happened to these boxes of microfilm they would be gone. So I said let's just get this digitized right now and give copies to everyone we know and make sure it can't get lost.

It was a scary thought, and I do believe that from the older missions there is data that has been lost and we're never going to find it."

The weird story of Apollo's ALSEP stations

Sometimes, the story behind lost data is more bizarre than it just getting chucked out in the trash.

Take the case of the ALSEP stations. Short for Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Packages, these were science stations left on the moon by every Apollo mission that landed after Apollo 11 (Apollo 11 deployed a simpler package, but it was still basically the same thing).

The ALSEP stations recorded things such as temperature, moonquakes, cosmic-ray exposure, heat flow in the sub-surface, the moon's gravitational and magnetic field, and more.

The ALSEP stations took these readings continuously, beaming them back to Earth until the stations were shut down in 1977.

Their data had been stored on magnetic tape at the University of Texas at Galveston — and then the Marine Mammal Protection Act happened.

What does that have to do with astronomical data? "This is what makes it so weird!" said Williams. Previously, magnetic tapes had used whale oil as a lubricant to prevent them from drying out or getting stuck in the tape players.

"It turned out that whale oil was the perfect lubricant for computer tapes, because it was non-conductive, it didn't harm the magnetic substrate, it did have magnetic properties and didn’t mess up the tape-reading machines," said Williams.

With the (quite right) passing of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, whale oil could no longer be used. That was okay; a company had anticipated this and devised a new lubricant to replace the whale oil.

But then, six months later, it was discovered that the new lubricant was drying out the magnetic tapes and causing them to rip in the tape players.

That left NASA in a bind. Data was coming down from satellites and interplanetary missions all the time, and they needed tapes to record that data.

There was no time to wait for someone to come up with a new lubricant, as they needed somewhere to store all this new incoming data.

"So, they started pillaging old tapes that still had whale oil on them and writing over them," said Williams. "And at some point someone found the ALSEP tapes and wrote over them, so now they're gone."

All that survived were a bunch of tapes that contained about two weeks' worth of data from the ALSEP stations that some researchers must have borrowed from the archive before the pillaging began.

"All the other ones were gone," said Williams. "And all because of whale oil!"

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