TYB!
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
January 20, 2025
Comet ATLAS Rounds the Sun
Why does Comet ATLAS have such colorful tails? Last week Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) passed its closest to the Sun well inside the orbit of Mercury and brightened dramatically. Unfortunately, the comet was then so angularly near the Sun that it was very hard for humans to see. But NASA's SOHO spacecraft saw it. Pictured is a SOHO (LASCO C3) image of Comet ATLAS that is a composite of several different color filters. Of the several tails visible, the central white tails are likely made of dust and just reflecting back sunlight. The red, blue, and green tails are likely ion tails with their colors dominated by light emitted by specific gases that were ejected from the comet and energized by the Sun. Currently, Comet ATLAS is showing long tails in southern skies but fading as it moves out of the inner Solar System.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Space Recommendations for the Second Trump Administration
Jan 20, 2025
The Trump Administration will inherit NASA at a crossroads: while the U.S. space agency continues to lead the world in ambition and capability, its continued preeminence is not guaranteed.
Although programmatic corrections are necessary, we believe the fundamental strategy for exploration is sound, providing NASA with a strong foundation for the years ahead.
NASA’s Artemis program is the nation’s most serious lunar exploration effort since Apollo.
And even though technical challenges remain, the United States’ commitment to a sustained lunar presence has already yielded a global coalition of scientific, commercial, and national actors committing tens of billions of dollars toward supportive lunar exploration and development. Meanwhile, the Artemis Accords have been signed by more than 50 nations united by a vision of peaceful lunar exploration.
NASA’s five scientific divisions have clear program priorities outlined by their respective decadal survey reports, prepared every ten years by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Taken as a whole, these recommend a historic investment in ambitious, boundary-pushing scientific investigation.
Furthermore, the United States’ vibrant commercial space sector is the envy of the world.
Thanks to decades of investment by NASA, a new generation of private and commercial companies is creating a new space economy, the limits of which are still being tested.
And despite the partisanship dividing the nation, NASA still enjoys broad congressional support and is among the most popular agencies in government, second only to the postal service.
The public continues to support U.S. leadership in space and is particularly excited about scientific exploration and planetary defense — two areas of unique capability within NASA.
The space program thus presents a real opportunity to unite the nation behind shared goals for peaceful exploration.
However, NASA is clearly struggling to deliver on its current commitments.
All major components of Artemis have either increased in cost, been delayed, or both; NASA’s science directorate is struggling under budgets and growing costs that have already delayed most of its next-generation science and exploration projects.
Furthermore, the agency’s workforce, management, and infrastructure suffer from various interconnected challenges due to underinvestment and lack of focus, which will require strong leadership and vision to address.
Given these challenges and opportunities, The Planetary Society offers the following recommendations to the incoming Trump Administration:
1 Implement a vision and timeline for exploration and scientific discovery.
2 Embrace NASA’s unique abilities in science and human spaceflight.
3 Get NASA back on track to making revolutionary discoveries in the space sciences.
4 Demand the best performance from NASA’s civil service, contractors, and commercial partners.
Cont.
https://www.planetary.org/articles/space-policy-recommendations-for-the-second-trump-administration
Donald J. Trump Attends the Presidential Parade
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mHYtO-kR38
https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2025/news-2025-005
NASA's Hubble Traces Hidden History of Andromeda Galaxy
January 16, 2025 2:15PM
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.
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.
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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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Axiom and TUA Sign Collaboration Agreement for Space Technologies
20/01/2025
The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Axiom Space and the Turkish Space Agency (TUA) stands out as a major step towards Turkey’s space ecosystem.
This agreement aims to ensure Turkey’s integration into the global space supply chain and strengthen its leading position in space technologies.
Partnership and Goals
The two sides will assess the potential of the Turkish space industry to develop the Axiom Station and prepare for the post-International Space Station era of commercial space stations.
The goals include:
Establishing laboratories for space research and exploration,
Developing production facilities that utilize microgravity environments,
Testing space materials and validating technologies for deep space missions,
Creation of a hub for logistics and transportation in LEO.
Turkey's Global Role
Minister of Industry and Technology Mehmet Fatih Kacır stated that this cooperation will increase Turkey's power in space technologies through international cooperation and increase the interest of young generations in this field.
He emphasized that Turkey aims to get a larger share of the global space economy, which is expected to reach 1 trillion dollars.
TUA President Yusuf Kıraç's Vision
TUA President Yusuf Kıraç stated that this cooperation gained even more meaning after Turkey's first astronaut was sent into space with Axiom Space's Ax-3 mission.
Kıraç said that the integration of Turkey's space industry into the world supply chain will provide significant contributions to economic growth and technological advancement.
This partnership will support not only Turkey's space industry but also the growth of the global space ecosystem.
Inspiring Turkey's young population and increasing economic potential, this agreement opens new doors for a sustainable future in space technologies.
https://raillynews.com/2025/01/axiom-and-tua-sign-cooperation-agreement-for-space-technologies/
Best foxhole (froghole?) ever.
3D structure of iconic Ring Nebula gives 'a brand new view of an old astronomical friend'
January 20, 2025
One of the most photographed objects in the night sky is the Ring Nebula, wreckage of a bygone sun-like star about 2,000 light-years from Earth.
Its striking, smoke-ring-like appearance has both awed and puzzled astronomers, who have long debated whether this remnant truly takes on a ring shape or if its appearance is merely an illusion created by our viewpoint in space.
Fresh observations of the Ring Nebula have now traced the motion of gas molecules along its border, allowing astronomers to tease out its structure in greater detail.
The results show the remnant is shaped less like a perfect ring and more like a barrel, with our viewpoint aligned directly down its poles, Joel Kastner of the Rochester Institute of Technology told reporters on Tuesday (Jan. 14) during the 245th American Astronomical Society (AAS) press conference in Maryland.
We are staring "right down the barrel of it, which is really quite surprising to me — we're just lucky," he said, noting the findings provide essentially "a brand new view of an old astronomical friend."
These findings help scientists better understand the processes that sculpt complex planetary nebulas, which, despite their name, have no actual connection to planets.
They are actually the remnants of stars similar to ours that died long ago. The misnomer arose because of these nebulas' planet-like appearance when viewed by early astronomers through small telescopes.
"Planetary nebulae were once thought to be simple, round objects with a single dying star at the center," astronomer Roger Wesson of Cardiff University said in a previous statement.
"It begs the question: how does a spherical star create such intricate and delicate non-spherical structures?"
In an attempt to find out, last year, Kastner and his colleagues used the Submillimeter Array (SMA) — a network of radio dishes atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii — to gather high-resolution images of the Ring Nebula.
Specifically, they mapped movements of carbon monoxide gas molecules that outline the nebula. Kastner said tracking the velocities and locations of those molecules, which were thrown out by the dying, sun-like star that created the nebula about 4,000 years ago, revealed its 3D shape in detail — something that cannot be determined from collapsed views by telescopes, even powerful observatories like the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes.
In addition to helping the researchers nail down the nebula's ellipsoidal structure, the 3D model also confirmed that the stellar corpse of the bygone star known as a white dwarf, which is seen as the tiny white dot within the nebula, is indeed located at its center.
"That was not a foregone conclusion," Kastner said during the AAS press conference.
The white dwarf appears slightly off-center in many telescope images; this, however, could be due to our viewing angle and the remnant's slightly misaligned "poles," rather than the star's position itself, Kastner explained.
Recent exquisite images from the James Webb Space Telescope had revealed several concentric arcs just beyond the outer edge of the main ring, which seem to have formed every 280 years.
But there is no obvious reason for why that would occur with such precise regularity, leading astronomers to posit an unseen companion star likely orbits the central white dwarf.
That hidden star, which astronomers estimate should be at least as far from the central star as Pluto is from the sun, would have sculpted material shed by the dying star to result in the stunningly complex nebula we see and love today.
Indeed, in the new observations, Kastner and his team observed "holes" in the nebula, which they attribute to faster, younger outflows shed by the hidden companion star.
The presence of a stellar sibling to the central star "will fiddle badly" with the simple, one-star scenario that forms these nebulas, Kastner said during the press conference.
https://www.space.com/the-universe/stars/3d-structure-of-iconic-ring-nebula-gives-a-brand-new-view-of-an-old-astronomical-friend
Executive order calls for cybersecurity review of civil space systems
January 20, 2025
One of the final space-related acts of the outgoing Biden administration is an executive order that directs cybersecurity reviews of ground systems and contract requirements for civil space systems.
The provisions are part of a broader executive order on cybersecurity released by the White House Jan. 16.
The order covers issues ranging from improving sanctions of cyber attackers to the use of artificial intelligence and “post-quantum cryptography” to improve security.
That order includes provisions regarding cybersecurity of space systems. “Cybersecurity threats to space systems have risen dramatically, threatening global critical infrastructure and communications,” the White House stated in a fact sheet about the order. “Their disruption can bring global commerce to a halt and seriously impact national security.”
One portion of the order calls for a review of ground systems used by civilian government agencies.
It calls on the National Cyber Director to review those ground systems and provide recommendations to “improve the cyber defenses and oversight” of them.
That report is due to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) 120 days after the order went into effect.
Ninety days after receipt of the report, OMB “shall take appropriate steps” to ensure those ground systems comply with relevant cybersecurity requirements, the order states.
A second space-related provision of the executive order calls for a review of contracting requirements for civil government space systems.
It requires NASA, the Department of Commerce and the Department of the Interior to review the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) in the next 180 days and recommend updates to them regarding cybersecurity.
“The recommended cybersecurity requirements and contract language shall use a risk-based, tiered approach for all new civil space systems,” the order states.
“Such requirements shall be designed to apply at minimum to the civil space systems’ on-orbit segments and link segments.”
The areas to be reviewed involve protecting command and control of space systems, ways to detect and respond to “anomalous network or system activity” and use of secure software and hardware development practices.
The order requires the Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council, which oversees the FAR, to act within 180 days of receiving those recommendations, making changes to the regulations “appropriate and consistent with applicable law.”
The order build upon previous efforts to study and strengthen cybersecurity of space systems.
That includes Space Policy Directive 5 by the first Trump administration in 2020 that outlined best practices for improving the cybersecurity of space systems.
A March 2023 national cybersecurity strategy by the White House also addressed “enhancing the security and resilience of U.S. space systems,” in part by formally implementing best practices from the 2020 directive.
The executive order is the final action on space policy by the outgoing Biden administration.
It largely implemented policies established by previous administrations on space issues and pushed, unsuccessfully, for creating a “mission authorization” regime for providing oversight of emerging commercial space activities.
The administration also brought in additional federal agencies to the National Space Council, although some in the space industry criticized the council for not appearing to be as active as in the first Trump administration. It is unclear, though, if the second Trump administration will continue the council.
https://spacenews.com/executive-order-calls-for-cybersecurity-review-of-civil-space-systems/
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2025/01/16/executive-order-on-strengthening-and-promoting-innovation-in-the-nations-cybersecurity/