TYB
Same. I haven't watched it since the early 2000's.
Super bizarre.
Definitely not a normal viewing experience kek
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
January 17, 2025
Supernova Remnant Cassiopeia A
Massive stars in our Milky Way Galaxy live spectacular lives. Collapsing from vast cosmic clouds, their nuclear furnaces ignite and create heavy elements in their cores. After only a few million years for the most massive stars, the enriched material is blasted back into interstellar space where star formation can begin anew. The expanding debris cloud known as Cassiopeia A is an example of this final phase of the stellar life cycle. Light from the supernova explosion that created this remnant would have been first seen in planet Earth's sky about 350 years ago, although it took that light 11,000 years to reach us. This sharp NIRCam image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows the still hot filaments and knots in the supernova remnant. The whitish, smoke-like outer shell of the expanding blast wave is about 20 light-years across. A series of light echoes from the massive star's cataclysmic explosion are also identified in Webb's detailed images of the surrounding interstellar medium.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Palm Bay council votes to support moving NASA HQ to Brevard County
January 17, 2025 at 7:03 AM
Palm Bay leaders unanimously voted Thursday to offer up city land as the new potential space for NASA’s headquarters.
The city council met to discuss sending a letter to Congress on the decision to support Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ push to move NASA’s HQ to Brevard County.
The governor has said such a move to the Space Coast would make sense and boost the state’s economy while critics argue NASA should have a place in the Capitol because of federal funding.
Thursday’s resolution states the council and city support efforts to “expand the government use of the existing 462 acres of the Space Force Malabar Transmitter Annex to generate high-skill and high-wage jobs and spur economic prosperity for (Palm Bay) residents,” clarifying elsewhere that the transmitter annex is located within city limits and adding “any relocation of technology-focused government offices to (the) area is expected to serve as an economic catalyst, bringing military and civilian personnel to Palm Bay.”
https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2025/01/17/palm-bay-council-votes-to-petition-congress-for-nasa-hq-in-brevard-county/
https://www.scribd.com/document/816860263/R-2025-03-Malabar-Annex-NASA-or-Space-Force-HQ#fullscreen&from_embed
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Hubble Reveals Jupiter in Ultraviolet Light
Jan 16, 2025
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the planet Jupiter in a color composite of ultraviolet wavelengths.
Released on Nov. 3, 2023, in honor of Jupiter reaching opposition, which occurs when the planet and the Sun are in opposite sides of the sky, this view of the gas giant planet includes the iconic, massive storm called the “Great Red Spot.”
Though the storm appears red to the human eye, in this ultraviolet image it appears darker because high altitude haze particles absorb light at these wavelengths.
The reddish, wavy polar hazes are absorbing slightly less of this light due to differences in either particle size, composition, or altitude.
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/hubble-reveals-jupiter-in-ultraviolet-light/
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/nasas-hubble-traces-hidden-history-of-andromeda-galaxy/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2aCFTYiJ4k
https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2025/news-2025-005
NASA’s Hubble Traces Hidden History of Andromeda Galaxy
Jan 16, 2025
In the years following the launch of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have tallied over 1 trillion galaxies in the universe.
But only one galaxy stands out as the most important nearby stellar island to our Milky Way — the magnificent Andromeda galaxy (Messier 31).
It can be seen with the naked eye on a very clear autumn night as a faint cigar-shaped object roughly the apparent angular diameter of our Moon.
A century ago, Edwin Hubble first established that this so-called "spiral nebula" was actually very far outside our own Milky Way galaxy — at a distance of approximately 2.5 million light-years or roughly 25 Milky Way diameters.
Prior to that, astronomers had long thought that the Milky way encompassed the entire universe. Overnight, Hubble's discovery turned cosmology upside down by unveiling an infinitely grander universe.
Now, a century later, the space telescope named for Hubble has accomplished the most comprehensive survey of this enticing empire of stars.
The Hubble telescope is yielding new clues to the evolutionary history of Andromeda, and it looks markedly different from the Milky Way's history.
Without Andromeda as a proxy for spiral galaxies in the universe at large, astronomers would know much less about the structure and evolution of our own Milky Way.
That's because we are embedded inside the Milky Way. This is like trying to understand the layout of New York City by standing in the middle of Central Park.
"With Hubble we can get into enormous detail about what's happening on a holistic scale across the entire disk of the galaxy. You can't do that with any other large galaxy," said principal investigator Ben Williams of the University of Washington.
Hubble's sharp imaging capabilities can resolve more than 200 million stars in the Andromeda galaxy, detecting only stars brighter than our Sun. They look like grains of sand across the beach.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Andromeda's total population is estimated to be 1 trillion stars, with many less massive stars falling below Hubble's sensitivity limit.
Photographing Andromeda was a herculean task because the galaxy is a much bigger target on the sky than the galaxies Hubble routinely observes, which are often billions of light-years away.
The full mosaic was carried out under two Hubble programs. In total, it required over 1,000 Hubble orbits, spanning more than a decade.
This panorama started with the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) program about a decade ago.
Images were obtained at near-ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared wavelengths using the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3 aboard Hubble to photograph the northern half of Andromeda.
This program was followed up by the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Southern Treasury (PHAST), recently published in The Astrophysical Journal and led by Zhuo Chen at the University of Washington, which added images of approximately 100 million stars in the southern half of Andromeda.
This region is structurally unique and more sensitive to the galaxy's merger history than the northern disk mapped by the PHAT survey.
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The combined programs collectively cover the entire disk of Andromeda, which is seen almost edge-on — tilted by 77 degrees relative to Earth's view.
The galaxy is so large that the mosaic is assembled from approximately 600 separate fields of view. The mosaic image is made up of at least 2.5 billion pixels.
The complementary Hubble survey programs provide information about the age, heavy-element abundance, and stellar masses inside Andromeda.
This will allow astronomers to distinguish between competing scenarios where Andromeda merged with one or more galaxies. Hubble's detailed measurements constrain models of Andromeda's merger history and disk evolution.
A Galactic 'Train Wreck'
Though the Milky Way and Andromeda formed presumably around the same time many billions of years ago, observational evidence shows that they have very different evolutionary histories, despite growing up in the same cosmological neighborhood.
Andromeda seems to be more highly populated with younger stars and unusual features like coherent streams of stars, say researchers. This implies it has a more active recent star-formation and interaction history than the Milky Way.
"Andromeda's a train wreck. It looks like it has been through some kind of event that caused it to form a lot of stars and then just shut down," said Daniel Weisz at the University of California, Berkeley.
"This was probably due to a collision with another galaxy in the neighborhood."
A possible culprit is the compact satellite galaxy Messier 32, which resembles the stripped-down core of a once-spiral galaxy that may have interacted with Andromeda in the past.
Computer simulations suggest that when a close encounter with another galaxy uses up all the available interstellar gas, star formation subsides.
"Andromeda looks like a transitional type of galaxy that's between a star-forming spiral and a sort of elliptical galaxy dominated by aging red stars," said Weisz.
"We can tell it's got this big central bulge of older stars and a star-forming disk that's not as active as you might expect given the galaxy's mass."
"This detailed look at the resolved stars will help us to piece together the galaxy's past merger and interaction history," added Williams.
Hubble's new findings will support future observations by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
Essentially a wide-angle version of Hubble (with the same sized mirror), Roman will capture the equivalent of at least 100 high-resolution Hubble images in a single exposure.
These observations will complement and extend Hubble's huge dataset.
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NASA Scientists Find New Human-Caused Shifts in Global Water Cycle
Jan 16, 2025
In a recently published paper, NASA scientists use nearly 20 years of observations to show that the global water cycle is shifting in unprecedented ways.
The majority of those shifts are driven by activities such as agriculture and could have impacts on ecosystems and water management, especially in certain regions.
“We established with data assimilation that human intervention in the global water cycle is more significant than we thought,” said Sujay Kumar, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and a co-author of the paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The shifts have implications for people all over the world. Water management practices, such as designing infrastructure for floods or developing drought indicators for early warning systems, are often based on assumptions that the water cycle fluctuates only within a certain range, said Wanshu Nie, a research scientist at NASA Goddard and lead author of the paper.
“This may no longer hold true for some regions,” Nie said.
“We hope that this research will serve as a guide map for improving how we assess water resources variability and plan for sustainable resource management, especially in areas where these changes are most significant.”
One example of the human impacts on the water cycle is in North China, which is experiencing an ongoing drought.
But vegetation in many areas continues to thrive, partially because producers continue to irrigate their land by pumping more water from groundwater storage, Kumar said.
Such interrelated human interventions often lead to complex effects on other water cycle variables, such as evapotranspiration and runoff.
Nie and her colleagues focused on three different kinds of shifts or changes in the cycle: first, a trend, such as a decrease in water in a groundwater reservoir; second, a shift in seasonality, like the typical growing season starting earlier in the year, or an earlier snowmelt; and third a change in extreme events, like “100-year floods” happening more frequently.
The scientists gathered remote sensing data from 2003 to 2020 from several different NASA satellite sources:
the Global Precipitation Measurement mission satellite for precipitation data, a soil moisture dataset from the European Space Agency’s Climate Change Initiative, and the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites for terrestrial water storage data.
They also used products from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer satellite instrument to provide information on vegetation health.
“This paper combines several years of our team’s effort in developing capabilities on satellite data analysis, allowing us to precisely simulate continental water fluxes and storages across the planet,” said Augusto Getirana, a research scientist at NASA Goddard and a co-author of the paper.
The study results suggest that Earth system models used to simulate the future global water cycle should evolve to integrate the ongoing effects of human activities.
With more data and improved models, producers and water resource managers could understand and effectively plan for what the “new normal” of their local water situation looks like, Nie said.
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/gpm/nasa-scientists-find-new-human-caused-shifts-in-global-water-cycle/
Spacewalkers Wrap Up X-Ray Telescope Repair Job and More
January 16, 2025
NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Nick Hague concluded their spacewalk at 2:01 p.m. EST on Jan. 16.
It was the fourth spacewalk for Hague and the eighth for Williams, and it was the 273rd spacewalk in support of space station assembly, maintenance, and upgrades.
Williams and Hague completed their primary objectives, including removing and replacing a rate gyro assembly, installing patches to cover damaged areas of light filters on the NICER (Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer) x-ray telescope, and replacing a reflector device on one of the international docking adapters.
The pair also checked access areas and connector tools that astronauts will use for future Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer maintenance.
https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/2025/01/16/spacewalkers-wrap-up-x-ray-telescope-repair-job-and-more/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYPk8fz_SbE
Seed-sized space chip
17/01/2025
Smaller than a strawberry seed, this tiny signal amplifier was produced by the European Space Agency to fill a missing link in current technology, helping to make future radar-observing and telecommunications space missions feasible.
“This integrated circuit is a low noise amplifier, measuring just 1.8 by 0.9 mm across,” explains ESA microwave engineer David Cuadrado-Calle.
“Delivering state of the art performance, the low noise amplifier’s task is to boost very faint signals to usable levels.”
It could in the future be employed for both radar-based missions – where the faint signals are the radar echoes received by the instrument after they bounce off Earth’s surface and travel back to the satellite – and telecommunications missions – where the communication signals coming from Earth are amplified by the satellite and sent back to Earth for broadband access or broadcasting services.
“The amplifier was designed by ESA’s Radio Frequency Equipment and Technology Section, and built in gallium nitride on silicon, rendering it much more robust against high input power signals than previous designs. T
he manufacturing of the chip was done at MACOM’s European Semiconductor Centre (formerly OMMIC) in France.”
Driving the circuit design were the needs of a proposed ESA mission, an Earth Explorer candidate called Wivern, to follow on from the current radar-based cloud-profiling EarthCARE mission undertaken by ESA with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA.
Wivern – short for wind velocity radar nephoscope – would provide the first measurements of wind within clouds and precipitation while also delivering profiles of rain, snow and ice water to improve forecasts of hazardous weather and provide new insights into severe storms.
To achieve this Wivern would employ W-band radar signals. In practice this would involve transmitting thousands of watts of power, and the mission’s receive chain would have to withstand their leakage.
W-band also holds potential for future higher-frequency and higher-bandwidth satellite telecommunications.
David adds: “Producing this low noise amplifier was an exciting exercise for us because while such work is normally given to European industry or universities, in this instance, we knew exactly what we needed, and we had the skills to achieve it. Having this as an in-house project also gave us a chance to flex our chip design muscles.”
The low noise amplifier’s functionality was checked out at VTT Millilab, ESA’s external high-frequency laboratory, and was recently reported in the prestigious Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Microwave and Wireless Technology Letters.
https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2025/01/Seed-sized_space_chip
Starship's Seventh Flight Test
January 16, 2025
The first Starship flight test of 2025 flew with ambitious goals: seeking to repeat our previous success of launching and catching the world’s most powerful launch vehicle while putting a redesigned and upgraded Starship through a rigorous set of flight demonstrations.
It served as a reminder that development testing, by definition, can be unpredictable.
On its seventh flight test, Starship successfully lifted off from Starbase in Texas at 4:37 p.m. CT on Thursday, January 16.
At launch, all 33 Raptor engines powered the Super Heavy booster and Starship on a nominal ascent. Following a successful hot-stage separation, the booster successfully transitioned to its boostback burn, with 12 of the planned 13 Raptor engines relighting, to begin its return to the launch site.
Super Heavy then relit all 13 planned middle ring and center Raptor engines and performed its landing burn, including the engine that did not relight for boostback burn.
The landing burn slowed Super Heavy down and maneuvered itself to the launch and catch tower arms, resulting in the second successful catch of a Super Heavy booster.
Following stage separation, the Starship upper stage successfully lit all six Raptor engines and performed its ascent burn to space.
Prior to the burn’s completion, telemetry was lost with the vehicle after approximately eight and a half minutes of flight. Initial data indicates a fire developed in the aft section of the ship, leading to a rapid unscheduled disassembly.
Starship flew within its designated launch corridor – as all U.S. launches do to safeguard the public both on the ground, on water and in the air. Any surviving pieces of debris would have fallen into the designated hazard area.
If you believe you have identified a piece of debris, please do not attempt to handle or retrieve the debris directly.
Instead, please contact your local authorities or the SpaceX Debris Hotline at 1-866-623-0234 or at recovery@spacex.com.
As always, success comes from what we learn, and this flight test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multiplanetary.
Data review is already underway as we seek out root cause. We will conduct a thorough investigation, in coordination with the FAA, and implement corrective actions to make improvements on future Starship flight tests.
The ship and booster for Starship’s eighth flight test are built and going through prelaunch testing and preparing to fly as we continue a rapid iterative development process to build a fully and rapidly reusable space transportation system.
https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-flight-7
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/01/fire-destroys-starship-on-its-seventh-test-flight-raining-debris-from-space/
https://thedebrief.org/james-webb-space-telescope-just-spotted-something-astronomers-have-never-seen-in-our-solar-system/
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ada02c
James Webb Space Telescope Just Spotted Something Astronomers Have Never Seen in our Solar System
January 17, 2025
Scientists have classified a novel category of exoplanets spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope that appear to have no equivalent in our solar system.
This newly proposed category of exoplanet, dubbed “Super Venus,” has often frustrated researchers due to its combination of properties that land it somewhere between Earth and Neptune.
A team of researchers believes their analysis of data captured by the JWST and complex computer simulations has finally allowed them to give these planets a category of their own.
The team also believes their findings can help shed more light on the complex dynamics behind planet formation for many of the over 5,000 exoplanets discovered by astronomers in the last 30 years.
James Webb Space Telescope SPots Planets Unlike Anything in our Solar System
Before 1995, humanity had not discovered planets beyond the eight in our solar system. Since then, astronomers have discovered thousands of worlds orbiting distant stars, and many more viable candidates are waiting to be verified.
Some distant planets appear to have properties similar to gas giants, icy worlds, and rocky worlds found orbiting the sun. However, many more have displayed unexpected properties and unusual characteristics, making them difficult to classify immediately.
Among the most common types of planets that scientists find difficult to characterize is a group of distant worlds larger than the Earth but smaller than Neptune.
In many cases, spectral readings captured by JWST’s instruments indicate these planets may be rocky and Earth-like with a thick, hydrogen-rich atmosphere.
In other cases, these planets share characteristics with Neptune, including an icy surface and a water-rich atmosphere. If found in our solar system, these properties would land them in the category of what astronomers term water worlds.
The task is further complicated by the thick clouds surrounding these types of planets, which analyze the atmosphere and planetary surface below incredibly difficult from light years away.
To break the stalemate, an international team of researchers led by Everett Schlawin at the University of Arizona and Steward Observatory and Kazumasa Ohno at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan combined data from the JWST and newly planetary formation models.
The result is an entirely new class of planet.
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Peeking Beneath the Clouds of Exoplanet GJ 1214 b
The team began by analyzing data captured by the JWST on an exoplanet called GJ 1214 b due to its comparatively close location to Earth.
At only 48 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus, the research team deemed it the easiest to study an example of a planet halfway between Earth and Neptune.
After dissecting the data captured by JWST, which was captured when the planet passed between Earth and its star, the team made a surprising discovery: the planet wasn’t anything like Earth or Neptune.
Instead, the atmospheric data showed that GJ 1214 b had concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) in its upper atmosphere that were much closer to those of Earth’s neighbor, Venus.
Although the discovery was promising, the team says there were “uncertainties” in the data that required additional analysis before they declared success.
“The detected CO2 signal from the first study is tiny, and so it required careful statistical analysis to ensure that it is real,” explained Ohno in a statement.
“At the same time, we needed the physical and chemical insights to extract the true nature of GJ 1214 b’s atmosphere from Schlawin’s study.”
After plugging the data into planetary formation models and running several “what if” scenarios, the team found a candidate that best hatched what they saw with GJ 1214 b.
More massive than Earth and rocky but with a dense, carbon-dominated atmosphere, the best way they could describe their discovery was as a Super Venus.
Findings Could Aid the Search for Planets Capable of Supporting Life
While the team’s findings are tantalizing, the researchers acknowledge that their detection of atmospheric CO2, which would make the classification of a Super Venus an agreed-upon planetary category, is relatively small.
According to Schlawin, the chemical signals captured by the JWST from 48 light years away are like only comparing a small segment of a significantly larger book to a copy to detect minuscule differences.
“It’s equivalent to Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace,” the researcher explained. “If I gave you two copies and changed one sentence in one of the books, could you find that sentence?”
The team stresses that future research will be required to confirm their findings. If their new planetary classification is correct, they believe their work can aid scientists studying planetary formation, including exobiologists hunting the cosmos for places suitable to life.
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