NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

January 6, 2025

Colliding Spiral Galaxies from Webb and Hubble

Billions of years from now, only one of these two galaxies will remain. Until then, spiral galaxies NGC 2207 and IC 2163 will slowly pull each other apart, creating tides of matter, sheets of shocked gas, lanes of dark dust, bursts of star formation, and streams of cast-away stars. The featured image in scientifically assigned colors is a composite of Hubble exposures in visible light and Webb exposures in infrared light. Astronomers predict that NGC 2207, the larger galaxy on the right, will eventually incorporate IC 2163, the smaller galaxy on the left. In the most recent encounter that about peaked 40 million years ago, the smaller galaxy is swinging around counter-clockwise and is now slightly behind the larger galaxy. The space between stars is so vast that when galaxies collide, the stars in them usually do not collide.

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

Meet Trump’s NASA Landing Team

January 6, 2025

The volunteer team planning the future of the US space agency under incoming President Donald Trump is overwhelmingly focused on promoting the commercial space sector.

Run silent: Typically, transition staffers who lay the groundwork for policies and appointments before a new president takes office are disclosed, but this time around, there has been no announcement.

Here’s the team we ID’d from conversations with government officials and space executives familiar with the process, who spoke on background to discuss the previously undisclosed team:

Charles Miller: A member of the first Trump administration’s transition team, Miller is a former NASA official who is now the chairman of Lynk, a direct-to-device satellite company that is struggling to go public through a merger with a SPAC backed by baseball star Alex Rodriguez.

Greg Autry: A longtime advocate for commercial space, Autry is a professor at the University of Central Florida who also worked on the 2016 Trump NASA transition and was nominated to serve as NASA’s CFO, though Congress failed to approve his nomination. He’s signing his emails “DOGE/NASA Transition.”

Ryan Whitley: A NASA engineer who was detailed to the National Space Council during Trump’s previous term, Whitley last worked on the Artemis HLS program before spending just over a year at ispace, the Japanese lunar company.

Lorna Finman: A Stanford PhD who worked on the Star Wars program at Raytheon back in the day, Finman’s LinkedIn says she has been advising the Heritage Foundation on space policy since 2023.

Jim Morhard: The NASA deputy administrator during Trump’s first term, Morhard was a longtime GOP senate staffer.

We reached out to the Trump transition office as well as the team members for comment and didn’t hear back—except for Miller, who suggested we catch up after inauguration day.

What to expect? All of these folks, but particularly the first three, have a long history of advocating for the private sector to take a bigger role in space exploration and cutting red tape.

That could mean anything from consolidation at the space agency to a radical re-thinking of the Artemis mission. If the latter is the case, watch out, SLS.

Hard running: Last year, Whitley wrote a critique of the latest Blue Ribbon report fretting about NASA’s future.

He identified a key problem with agency level planning: Whatever NASA officials want to do, they are beholden to the White House and Congress for the real decisions.

https://payloadspace.com/meet-trumps-nasa-landing-team/

https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/01/05/nasas-rejection-hillary-clinton-astronaut/

Did NASA Reject Young Hillary Clinton's Dream of Being an Astronaut?

Jan 5, 2025

Former presidential candidate and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has often repeated a story about a time in her childhood when she wrote a letter to NASA expressing a dream of becoming an astronaut one day.

NASA responded, she claimed, explaining they did not have any women astronauts. Clinton has repeated this many times over the years, with the details recounted largely the same in each case.

In one speech, honoring Amelia Earhart in 2012, she said:

Now some of you may know that when I was a little girl growing up in Illinois, I was interested in all kinds of stories about women. And my mother … was a real fan of Amelia Earhart's, and actually told me about Amelia Earhart.

And then when we decided, under President Kennedy's leadership, that our nation was going to go to the moon and we were going to have an astronaut program, I wanted to be an astronaut.

So when I was about 13, I wrote to NASA and asked what I needed to do to try to be an astronaut. And of course, there weren't any women astronauts, and NASA wrote me back and said there would not be any women astronauts.

And I was just crestfallen. But then I realized I couldn't see very well, and I wasn't all that athletic, so probably – (laughter) – I wouldn't be the first woman astronaut anyway.

The Washington Post investigated this story in 2015, reaching out to NASA and the Clinton campaign. Neither could reproduce the correspondence that Clinton described, given that the interaction took place around half a century ago.

But NASA did argue that such an interaction likely did take place, and they had no reason to doubt Clinton's story. Agency officials said such a response was consistent with their policy at the time.

"In 1962, the requirements for being an astronaut included being a military test pilot with a degree in engineering," spokesperson Lauren Worley said. "More than 50 years later, NASA's astronaut corps reflects our nation's diversity."

NASA did not have a women's astronaut program then. The first American woman who went to space was Sally Ride in 1983, while Susan Helms was the first woman crew member aboard the space station in 2001.

The Washington Post did share an excerpt from NASA's research about a failed private screening for women astronauts in the 1960s:

Dr. Randy Lovelace had been running (in 1960/61) a private screening program for potential women astronauts that was abruptly terminated in September 1961.

That fall, there were many questions raised about why the program had been ended — with many fingers in the press and on Capitol Hill pointing at NASA.

In the summer of 1962 there were congressional hearings on the topic.

1/2

>>22302010

What had actually happened in September 1961 is that Dr. Lovelace had tried to run further tests on his women astronaut aspirants at Pensacola Naval Air Station.

(It should be noted that most of the women weren't completely aware the Dr. Lovelace had no official backing for this effort.)

Before committing resources to these tests the U.S. Navy asked NASA if this was an official program. Surprised NASA officials said no, and the Navy refused to let Dr. Lovelace run the tests at Pensacola.

In discussions between NASA Deputy Administrator Hugh Dryden and U.S. Navy officials that fall, Dryden's position was that "NASA does not at this time have a requirement for such a program" but that it might investigate the possibility "at some time in the future."

This was the official policy on women astronauts and NASA response letters to women throughout the 1960s reflect this perspective.

The Washington Post reviewed archived documents from that time and found a number of similar responses from NASA that gently encouraged the girls writing to them, while maintaining their policy of not planning to train female astronauts.

One example was a letter found in Ride's collection. It was sent to Ride by a woman named Linda Halpern who had written to NASA in 1962, and she received a response from the agency that said:

"while many women are employed in other capacities in the space program — some of them in extremely important scientific posts — we have no present plans to employ women on space flights because of the degree of scientific and flight training, and the physical characteristics, which are required."

A NASA spokesperson responded to our questions with the following statement:

"Unfortunately, because so many letters of this kind were received, we do not have a record of a letter to or from Mrs. Clinton in the 1960s, but we have no reason to doubt her account."

NASA also shared with us, correspondence between former astronaut Marsha Ivins and the space agency from 1970, written when Ivins was in college:

In short, although there is plenty of circumstantial evidence showing it is likely that NASA sent Clinton such a response, there is no way to verify the actual correspondence decades later.

2/2

>>22301997

>Happy Jan 6 to those who celebrate

That's a kek

NASA Unveils the Stunning Turquoise Phenomenon Transforming Patagonia’s Oceans

January 6, 2025

Satellite images from late December 2024 revealed a stunning phytoplankton bloom off the Patagonian Shelf, illustrating the rich aquatic diversity and productivity in the South Atlantic.

The vibrant swirls of green and blue captured by NASA’s PACE satellite not only highlight the natural beauty but also the ecological significance of these blooms in global carbon cycling and marine health.

Blossoming Seas: The Marvel of Phytoplankton

Bloom season has been underway for several months, showcasing vibrant activity in the nutrient-rich South Atlantic waters off Argentina.

During austral spring 2024, satellites captured a striking image of a large phytoplankton bloom along the Patagonian Shelf.

These tiny aquatic organisms thrived through the extended daylight of the Southern Hemisphere summer, coloring the ocean’s surface in vivid shades of green and blue into late December.

Technological Insight: Satellite Monitoring of Oceanic Phenomena

On December 28, 2024, the Ocean Color Instrument (OCI) aboard NASA’s PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem) satellite captured an intricate image of the bloom swirling around the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas).

The Patagonian Shelf-break front, enriched by airborne dust, iron-laden currents, and deep ocean upwelling, provides an abundance of nutrients that fuel these phytoplankton communities.

These microscopic sunlight harvesters not only drive the region’s rich aquatic diversity but also sustain productive fisheries.

Dynamic Shifts in Marine Life

The various colors visible in the image likely reflect a mix of phytoplankton communities. The proportions of these communities change throughout the months-long bloom based on nutrient availability and other environmental factors.

In this scene, chlorophyll-rich diatoms and other phytoplankton types that color the water green may be giving way to coccolithophores, said Ivona Cetinić, an oceanographer at Morgan State University and member of NASA’s Ocean Ecology lab.

Ecological Impact: Phytoplankton’s Role in the Carbon Cycle

“Coccolithophores love long days and lots of sunshine, so they are probably dominating now,” she said. Armored with plates of highly reflective calcium carbonate, these organisms make surface waters appear a milky turquoise-blue.

The coccolithophore bloom that emerges each year off Patagonia is part of the so-called Great Calcite Belt. Stretching around the planet in southern waters, the region is thought to play a major role in the planet’s carbon cycle.

The distribution of colors in the image also reveals complexities in the ocean’s surface waters.

“Plankton cannot swim against currents,” Cetinić said, “so the different stripes of color indicate many different water masses containing different levels of elements needed for the growth of different phytoplankton types.”

Challenges and Advancements in Marine Research

It remains a longstanding challenge to identify what types of phytoplankton are present in a bloom using remote sensing imagery alone.

But scientists are getting closer thanks to the hyperspectral (fine wavelength resolution) data acquired by the PACE satellite.

Cetinić and colleagues have developed a tool that enabled them to distinguish three different phytoplankton communities based on hyperspectral signatures.

The scientists find the method promising but note that it is still under development.

Monitoring phytoplankton on a global scale using daily observations by PACE may help scientists and resource managers monitor fisheries health, track harmful algal blooms, and identify changes in the marine environment.

https://scitechdaily.com/nasa-unveils-the-stunning-turquoise-phenomenon-transforming-patagonias-oceans/