TYB
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
January 16, 2025
M83: The Southern Pinwheel
Beautiful and bright spiral galaxy M83 lies a some twelve million light-years away, near the southeastern tip of the very long constellation Hydra. Prominent spiral arms traced by dark dust lanes and blue star clusters lend this galaxy its popular name, The Southern Pinwheel. Still, reddish star forming regions that dot this cosmic pinwheel's spiral arms have suggested another nickname, the Thousand-Ruby Galaxy. A mere 40,000 light-years across, smaller than the Milky Way, M83 is a member of a group of galaxies that includes active galaxy Centaurus A. In fact, the core of M83 itself is bright at x-ray energies, showing a high concentration of neutron stars and black holes left from an intense burst of star formation. This sharp color image also features spiky foreground Milky Way stars and distant background galaxies. The image data was captured with the Dark Energy Camera and Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
California Wildfires: NASA Images Reveal 'Charred' Landscape
Jan 16, 2025 at 9:35 AM EST
As wildfires scorch huge swaths of Los Angeles, aircraft have captured the scale of the destruction from far above.
The extent of the Eaton fire, which has now ravaged 14,117 acres of the city since it started burning on January 7, can be seen in new NASA images of Altadena.
The picture was snapped on January 11 using NASA's AVIRIS-3 (Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer-3) on board a B200 aircraft flying over Los Angeles County.
The image is in false color to highlight the areas "charred" by the blaze: burned trees and buildings appear dark brown, and scorched wildlands are colored orange.
At least 25 people have been killed by the wildfires around the city, which have burned over 12,000 structures and forced nearly 200,000 people to evacuate their homes.
The largest and most destructive of the blazes, the Palisades fire, has burned 23,713 acres so far, including nearly the entirety of the Pacific Palisades neighborhood.
Nine people are known to have died in the Palisades fire, and 16 have been killed by the Eaton fire in Altadena.
The Palisades fire is still only 21 percent contained, while the Eaton fire is 45 percent contained.
There are three other fires also burning around LA: the 799-acre Hurst fire in San Fernando, the 61-acre Auto fire in Oxnard, and the 34-acre Little Mountain fire in San Bernadino.
The Hurst fire is 98 percent contained, the Auto fire is 85 percent contained, but the Little Mountain fire, which only started on January 15, is currently 0 percent contained.
When the above image was taken on January 11, the Eaton fire was also at 14,117 acres in size, and was 15 percent contained.
These fires were strongly exacerbated by the powerful Santa Ana winds, with gusts of up to 100mph fanning the flames and helping them to rapidly spread and burn the dry vegetation around the city.
These winds are expected to drop in the coming days, but may strengthen again next week.
"Gentle offshore winds will continue to weaken tonight. Calmer but dry conditions will build Thursday with some moisture arriving this weekend.
Critical fire weather conditions will likely return early next week," Cal Fire wrote in a status update for the Eaton fire.
Images taken using NASA's AVIRIS-3 are very useful for researching the behavior of wildfires, and to study the emissions from the fire and erosions of the soil.
"In addition to assisting with damage assessments, these data may help us understand the chemical composition and toxic nature of ash in the post-fire environment and how it redistributes over time via wind and water flows, with subsequent data acquisitions," said Michael Falkowski, manager of NASA's wildland fire program.
For now, the wildfires continue to blaze, and there are fears that they could take weeks to fully extinguish, Cal Fire Battalion Chief David Acuña told host Kate Bolduan during an interview on CNN News Central.
https://www.newsweek.com/eaton-fire-los-angeles-altadena-nasa-image-wildfires-california-2016002
Moon Bound: Blue Ghost Captures First Image, Performs Health Checks
January 16, 2025 9:41 am
On Jan. 15, Firefly Aerospace successfully launched 10 NASA science and technology instruments on the company’s first CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) delivery.
The NASA instrument teams are performing initial health checks and collecting data ahead of the lunar landing in early March.
Flight controllers for Blue Ghost Mission 1 said Wednesday that the company’s spacecraft continues to meet mission milestones including acquisition of signal, and maintaining communications through its Mission Operations Center in Cedar Park, Texas.
Six NASA payloads aboard the flight, including the Radiation Tolerant Computer (RadPC) technology demonstration, Stereo Camera for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies (SCALPSS), Lunar PlanetVac (LPV), Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity (LISTER), Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE), and the Electrodynamic Dust Shield (EDS) are already sending initial data back to Earth.
All NASA payloads are healthy, and additional payload data sets are expected during this transit period, as the mission continues its 45-day trajectory before landing on the surface of the Moon.
https://blogs.nasa.gov/artemis/tag/firefly-aerospace/
https://fireflyspace.com/news/blue-ghost-mission-1-live-updates/
NASA shares photo of a ‘large, brown-eyed’ sandhill crane. This bird is special because…
Jan 16, 2025 08:31 AM IST
What’re you looking at? 👀
This sandhill crane is one of the 1,500 different species of plants and animals that make their home at @NASAKennedy, which shares space with the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge.
The Space Coast is a particularly favorable environment for sandhill cranes due to the region's shallow freshwater habitats, which provide nesting space and a variety of food sources.
Behind the crane, in the background, you can see the Vehicle Assembly Building, one of the largest buildings in the world and the staging ground for NASA’s biggest rockets—including the @NASAArtemis I rocket which launched our Orion spacecraft around the Moon in 2022.
Image description: The large, brown eyes of a sandhill crane stare directly into the camera; the crane’s head, its long, grey, narrow neck, and the top of its body are visible.
A blue sky with scattered clouds takes up most of the background; the square outline of the Vehicle Assembly Building, including its large, painted NASA “meatball” insignia, can be seen out of focus at the very bottom of the image.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/trending/nasa-shares-photo-of-a-large-brown-eyed-sandhill-crane-this-bird-is-special-because-101736995669502.html
https://www.instagram.com/p/DE3I3_Vyg6X/
a bit odd sounding to me
Extraordinary images reveal the mysteries of Mars
15 January 2025
From H. G. Wells’s alien invaders in The War of the Worlds to The Martian‘s abandoned astronaut, we have long been inspired by the idea that life could reside on Mars – human or otherwise.
Flybys, orbiters and landers, including NASA’s Perseverance rover and its aerial sidekick, Ingenuity, have made Mars one of the best understood planets in our solar system.
Now, more than ever, we are closer to answering the question: could life exist there?
A new book, Mars: Photographs from the NASA archive, celebrates the missions that have enriched our understanding of Mars and looks to a future where humans explore the Red Planet.
Pictured from top, main picture: the Dingo gap in Gale crater, which NASA’s Curiosity rover crossed; an impact crater at Meridiani Planum, shot by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera; Mars’s surface temperature, from cold blue to warm red, captured by the Mars Odyssey spacecraft’s Thermal Emission Imaging System; Perseverance photographs the parachute used to slow its landing; a rocket-powered stage lowers Perseverance onto Mars in a “sky crane” manoeuvre.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26535260-300-extraordinary-images-reveal-the-mysteries-of-mars/
https://www.taschen.com/en/books/photography/05372/mars-photographs-from-the-nasa-archives
Blue Origin’s New Glenn Reaches Orbit
Jan 16, 2025
New Glenn safely reached its intended orbit during today's NG-1 mission, accomplishing our primary objective.
New Glenn’s seven BE-4 engines ignited on January 16, 2025, at 2:03 a.m. EST (0703 UTC) from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
The second stage is in its final orbit following two successful burns of the BE-3U engines.
The Blue Ring Pathfinder is receiving data and performing well. We lost the booster during descent.
“I’m incredibly proud New Glenn achieved orbit on its first attempt,” said Dave Limp, CEO, Blue Origin.
“We knew landing our booster, So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance, on the first try was an ambitious goal.
We’ll learn a lot from today and try again at our next launch this spring. Thank you to all of Team Blue for this incredible milestone.”
New Glenn is foundational to advancing our customers’ critical missions as well as our own.
The vehicle underpins our efforts to establish sustained human presence on the Moon, harness in-space resources, provide multi-mission, multi-orbit mobility through Blue Ring, and establish destinations in low Earth orbit.
Future New Glenn missions will carry the Blue Moon Mark 1 cargo lander and the Mark 2 crewed lander to the Moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program.
The program has several vehicles in production and multiple years of orders. Customers include NASA, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, AST SpaceMobile, and several telecommunications providers, among others.
Blue Origin is certifying New Glenn with the U.S. Space Force for the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program to meet emerging national security objectives.
"Today marks a new era for Blue Origin and for commercial space," said Jarrett Jones, Senior Vice President, New Glenn. "We're focused on ramping our launch cadence and manufacturing rates.
My heartfelt thanks to everyone at Blue Origin for the tremendous amount of work in making today's success possible, and to our customers and the space community for their continuous support. We felt that immensely today."
https://www.blueorigin.com/news/new-glenn-ng-1-mission
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXysNxbGdCg
Redo
Blue Origin’s New Glenn Reaches Orbit
Jan 16, 2025
New Glenn safely reached its intended orbit during today's NG-1 mission, accomplishing our primary objective.
New Glenn’s seven BE-4 engines ignited on January 16, 2025, at 2:03 a.m. EST (0703 UTC) from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
The second stage is in its final orbit following two successful burns of the BE-3U engines.
The Blue Ring Pathfinder is receiving data and performing well. We lost the booster during descent.
“I’m incredibly proud New Glenn achieved orbit on its first attempt,” said Dave Limp, CEO, Blue Origin.
“We knew landing our booster, So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance, on the first try was an ambitious goal.
We’ll learn a lot from today and try again at our next launch this spring. Thank you to all of Team Blue for this incredible milestone.”
New Glenn is foundational to advancing our customers’ critical missions as well as our own.
The vehicle underpins our efforts to establish sustained human presence on the Moon, harness in-space resources, provide multi-mission, multi-orbit mobility through Blue Ring, and establish destinations in low Earth orbit.
Future New Glenn missions will carry the Blue Moon Mark 1 cargo lander and the Mark 2 crewed lander to the Moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program.
The program has several vehicles in production and multiple years of orders. Customers include NASA, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, AST SpaceMobile, and several telecommunications providers, among others.
Blue Origin is certifying New Glenn with the U.S. Space Force for the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program to meet emerging national security objectives.
"Today marks a new era for Blue Origin and for commercial space," said Jarrett Jones, Senior Vice President, New Glenn. "We're focused on ramping our launch cadence and manufacturing rates.
My heartfelt thanks to everyone at Blue Origin for the tremendous amount of work in making today's success possible, and to our customers and the space community for their continuous support. We felt that immensely today."
https://www.blueorigin.com/news/new-glenn-ng-1-mission
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXysNxbGdCg
NASA’s Pandora Mission One Step Closer To Probing Alien Atmospheres
Jan 16, 2025
Pandora, NASA’s newest exoplanet mission, is one step closer to launch with the completion of the spacecraft bus, which provides the structure, power, and other systems that will enable the mission to carry out its work.
“This is a huge milestone for us and keeps us on track for a launch in the fall,” said Elisa Quintana, Pandora’s principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
“The bus holds our instruments and handles navigation, data acquisition, and communication with Earth — it’s the brains of the spacecraft.”
Pandora, a small satellite, will provide in-depth study of at least 20 known planets orbiting distant stars in order to determine the composition of their atmospheres — especially the presence of hazes, clouds, and water.
This data will establish a firm foundation for interpreting measurements by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and future missions that will search for habitable worlds.
“We see the presence of water as a critical aspect of habitability because water is essential to life as we know it,” said Goddard’s Ben Hord, a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow who discussed the mission at the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in National Harbor, Maryland.
“The problem with confirming its presence in exoplanet atmospheres is that variations in light from the host star can mask or mimic the signal of water. Separating these sources is where Pandora will shine.”
Funded by NASA’s Astrophysics Pioneers program for small, ambitious missions, Pandora is a joint effort between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and NASA Goddard.
“Pandora’s near-infrared detector is actually a spare developed for the Webb telescope, which right now is the observatory most sensitive to exoplanet atmospheres,” Hord added.
“In turn, our observations will improve Webb’s ability to separate the star’s signals from those of the planet’s atmosphere, enabling Webb to make more precise atmospheric measurements.”
Astronomers can sample an exoplanet’s atmosphere when it passes in front of its star as seen from our perspective, an event called a transit. Part of the star’s light skims the atmosphere before making its way to us.
This interaction allows the light to interact with atmospheric substances, and their chemical fingerprints — dips in brightness at characteristic wavelengths — become imprinted in the light.
But our telescopes see light from the entire star as well, not just what’s grazing the planet. Stellar surfaces aren’t uniform.
They sport hotter, unusually bright regions called faculae and cooler, darker regions similar to sunspots, both of which grow, shrink, and change position as the star rotates.
Using a novel all-aluminum, 45-centimeter-wide (17 inches) telescope, jointly developed by Livermore and Corning Specialty Materials in Keene, New Hampshire, Pandora’s detectors will capture each star’s visible brightness and near-infrared spectrum at the same time, while also obtaining the transiting planet’s near-infrared spectrum.
This combined data will enable the science team to determine the properties of stellar surfaces and cleanly separate star and planetary signals.
The observing strategy takes advantage of the mission’s ability to continuously observe its targets for extended periods, something flagship missions like Webb, which are in high demand, cannot regularly do.
Over the course of its year-long prime mission, Pandora will observe at least 20 exoplanets 10 times, with each stare lasting a total of 24 hours.
Each observation will include a transit, which is when the mission will capture the planet’s spectrum.
https://science.nasa.gov/directorates/smd/astrophysics-division/exoplanet-exploration-program/nasas-pandora-mission-one-step-closer-to-probing-alien-atmospheres/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Inxe5Bgarj0
Exoplanets Need to Be Prepared for Extreme Space Weather, Chandra Finds
Jan 16, 2025
Planets around other stars need to be prepared for extreme weather conditions, according to a new study from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s (European Space Agency’s) XMM-Newton that examined the effects of X-rays on potential planets around the most common type of stars.
Astronomers found that only a planet with greenhouse gases in its atmosphere like Earth and at a relatively large distance away from the star they studied would have a chance to support life as we know it around a nearby star.
Wolf 359 is a red dwarf with a mass about a tenth that of the Sun. Red dwarf stars are the most common stars in the universe and live for billions of years, providing ample time for life to develop.
At a distance of only 7.8 light-years away, Wolf 359 is also one of the closest stars to the solar system.
“Wolf 359 can help us unlock the secrets around stars and habitability,” said Scott Wolk of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), who led the study.
“It’s so close and it belongs to such an important class of stars – it’s a great combination.”
Because red dwarfs are the most prevalent types of stars, astronomers have looked hard to find exoplanets around them.
Astronomers have found some evidence for two planets in orbit around Wolf 359 using optical telescopes, but those conclusions have been challenged by other scientists.
“While we don’t have proof of planets around Wolf 359 yet, it seems very possible that it hosts multiple planets,” Wolk added.
“This makes it an excellent test bed to look at what planets would experience around this kind of star.”
Wolk and his colleagues used Chandra and XMM to study the amounts of steady X-rays and extreme ultraviolet (UV) radiation – the most energetic type of UV radiation – that Wolf 359 would unleash on the possible planets around it.
They found that Wolf 359 is producing enough damaging radiation that only a planet with greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide in its atmosphere – and located at a relatively large distance from the star – would likely be able to sustain life.
“Just being far enough away from the star’s harmful radiation wouldn’t be enough to make it habitable,” said co-author Vinay Kashyap, also of CfA.
“A planet around Wolf 359 would also need to be blanketed in greenhouse gases like Earth is.”
To study the effects of energetic radiation on the habitability of the planet candidates, the team considered the star’s habitable zone – the region around a star where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface.
The outer limit of the habitable zone for Wolf 359 is about 15% of the distance between Earth and the Sun, because the red dwarf is much less bright than the Sun.
Neither of the planet candidates for this system is located in Wolf 359’s habitable zone, with one too close to the star and the other too far out.
“If the inner planet is there, the X-ray and extreme UV radiation it is subjected to would destroy the atmosphere of this planet in only about a million years,” said co-author Ignazio Pillitteri of CfA and the National Institute for Astrophysics in Palermo, Italy.
The team also considered the effects of radiation on as-yet undetected planets within the habitable zone.
They concluded that a planet like the Earth in the middle of the habitable zone should be able to sustain an atmosphere for almost two billion years, while one near the outer edge could last indefinitely, helped by the warming effects of greenhouse gases.
Another big danger for planets orbiting stars like Wolf 359 is from X-ray flares, or occasional bright bursts of X-rays, on top of the steady, everyday output from the star.
Combining observations made with Chandra and XMM-Newton resulted in the discovery of 18 X-ray flares from Wolf 359 over 3.5 days.
Extrapolating from these observed flares, the team expects that much more powerful and damaging flares would occur over longer periods of time.
The combined effects of the steady X-ray and UV radiation and the flares mean that any planet located in the habitable zone is unlikely to have a significant atmosphere long enough for multicellular life, as we know it on Earth, to form and survive.
The exception is the habitable zone’s outer edge if the planet has a significant greenhouse effect.
These results were presented at the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in National Harbor, Maryland, and are being prepared for publication in a journal.
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program.
The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.
https://www.nasa.gov/general/exoplanets-need-to-be-prepared-for-extreme-space-weather-chandra-finds/