NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

March 4, 2025

A Quadruple Alignment over Italy

Why does this Moon look so unusual? A key reason is its vivid red color. The color is caused by the deflection of blue light by Earth's atmosphere – the same reason that the daytime sky appears blue. The Moon also appears unusually distorted. Its strange structuring is an optical effect arising from layers in the Earth's atmosphere that refract light differently due to sudden differences in temperature or pressure. A third reason the Moon looks so unusual is that there is, by chance, an airplane flying in front. The featured picturesque gibbous Moon was captured about two weeks ago above Turin, Italy. Our familiar hovering sky orb was part of an unusual quadruple alignment that included two historic ground structures: the Sacra di San Michele on the near hill and Basilica of Superga just beyond.

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

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NASA captures stunning image of a supersonic jet shattering the sound barrier

March 4, 2025

NASA has released a stunning new picture of a supersonic aircraft breaking the sound barrier.

The photo shows Boom Supersonic’s demonstrator aircraft XB-1 during a Feb. 10 flight.

The privately-owned Boom Supersonic partnered with NASA to take the image with its Schlieren photography technology, which visualizes the shock waves that come from a high-speed jet.

To capture the photo, Boom had to plan exactly where the jet would travel and make sure it was flying in front of the sun at the moment it snapped the image.

“This image makes the invisible visible — the first American-made civil supersonic jet breaking the sound barrier,” Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, said in a press release.

Boom planes would cut coast-to-coast U.S. travel times by 50% and do it without making an audible boom, “which paves the way for coast-to-coast flights up to 50% faster,” Scholl said.

The firm is able to avoid the noise by breaking the sound barrier at an altitude high enough that the sound is never able to reach the ground.

Boom is testing the technology with hopes of operating the first commercial supersonic airline.

Its jets currently travel at speeds of around 750 miles per hour, but it hopes to eventually cruise at Mach 1.7, or 1,300 miles per hour.

The achievement marks a potential turning point in commercial aviation’s decades-long quest to bring back faster-than-sound travel following the Concorde’s demise.

But while Boom has secured more than $600 million in funding and 130 provisional orders from major airlines, the path to profitability remains challenging.

The company must prove it can overcome the same physics and economics that grounded Concorde while also navigating new concerns about aviation’s environmental impact.

Boom’s planes travel faster over water, about two times the speed of current commercial airplanes.

The company said its planes could revolutionize long-haul flights, cutting a 8.5 hour trip from Seattle to Tokyo down to just 4.5 hours.

https://qz.com/supersonic-jet-breaking-the-sound-barrier-nasa-boom-1851767562

NASA Tracking Bus-Sized Asteroid Approaching Earth Today

Updated Mar 04, 2025 at 10:11 AM EST

NASA is tracking a bus-sized asteroid zipping past the Earth at nearly 16,000 miles per hour today.

The asteroid, known as "2025 DM7," is estimated to be about 42 feet across and soared past our planet this morning at a distance of about 294,000 miles, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

The space rock could be anywhere between around 33 and 72 feet in diameter, noted the JPL's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS).

2025 DM7 is not the only asteroid within the vicinity of our planet today. Another bus-sized space rock, "2025 DT24," also skimmed past the Earth this morning.

And two airplane-sized asteroids—"2025 DT4" and "2025 DG3," each measuring around 100 feet across—are expected to make a close approach later today, according to CNEOS.

Last month, updated data from CNEOS showed that the impact probability of the asteroid known as "2024 YR4" in 2032 was at 3.1 percent, which was "the highest impact probability NASA has ever recorded for an object of this size or larger," the national space agency noted in a blog post on February 19.

However, further studies on the asteroid's trajectory brought the chance of Earth impact on December 22 in 2032 down to 0.004 percent, with NASA saying on February 24 that "there is no significant potential for this asteroid to impact our planet for the next century."

The space agency explained: "NASA has significantly lowered the risk of near-Earth asteroid 2024 YR4 as an impact threat to Earth for the foreseeable future.

When first discovered, asteroid 2024 YR4 had a very small, but notable chance of impacting our planet in 2032.

"The latest observations have further reduced the uncertainty of its future trajectory, and the range of possible locations the asteroid could be on Dec. 22, 2032, has moved farther away from the Earth."

Asteroids—small, rocky masses left over from the formation of the solar system around 4.6 billion years ago—are found concentrated in the main asteroid belt, orbiting around the sun between the paths of Mars and Jupiter.

The orbits of asteroids bring them within 120 million miles of the sun. Most near-Earth objects (NEOs) are asteroids that range in size from around 10 feet to almost 25 miles across.

"The majority of near-Earth objects have orbits that don't bring them very close to Earth, and therefore pose no risk of impact," NASA says.

A small portion of them, known as potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs), do merit closer observation.

Measuring more than about 460 feet in size, PHAs have orbits that bring them as close as within 4.6 million miles of the Earth's orbit around the sun, NASA explains.

Despite the number of PHAs out in our solar system, none of them are likely to hit Earth any time soon.

"The 'potentially hazardous' designation simply means over many centuries and millennia the asteroid's orbit may evolve into one that has a chance of impacting Earth.

We do not assess these long-term, many-century possibilities of impact," Paul Chodas, manager of the CNEOS, previously told Newsweek.

https://www.newsweek.com/asteroids-nasa-approach-earth-2025-dm7-2039277

Novel Metasurface Optical Element Could Shed New Light on Atmospheric Aerosols

Mar 04, 2025

Water droplets in burgeoning storm systems; particulates launched to the stratosphere by volcanic eruptions; ash from western wildfires drifting eastwards across the continental U.S. Aerosols such as these impact everything from severe weather to air quality.

Polarimeters, which characterize aerosols and cloud particles by observing how they interact with light, are one of scientists' best tools for understanding the massive role these tiny particles play in atmospheric events.

But while there are many airborne polarimeters available to scientists, only a few of these instruments have ever flown in space.

NASA’s Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission, launched in 2024, marked the first space-based science mission featuring polarimetry in over a decade.

Kirk Knobelspiesse, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, explained that creating advanced polarimeters to study the atmosphere is essential for studying Earth’s climate.

"The composition of aerosols, the shape, the size – that's something that we really need to understand better to improve climate modeling," Knobelspiesse said.

A team of researchers from the Capasso Group at Harvard University, supported by NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO), recently completed an early concept study exploring a new technology for space-based polarimetry.

Specifically, the team investigated whether a novel polarization-sensitive metasurface optical element might be useful for observing atmospheric particles.

The study, which spawned papers in Optics Express and Applied Optics, concluded that this metasurface optical element can reliably detect polarized light within the 550, 670, and 870 nanometer wavelengths, ideal light signatures for observing aerosols and cloud particles.

"I think all of this will play well for the long-term plans of NASA," said Federico Capasso, Robert Wallace Professor of Applied Physics at Harvard and Principal Investigator for this project.

Traditional optics, like lenses in a telescope, rely on a material’s bulk properties to control observed light.

Metasurface optics, on the other hand, rely on complex arrays of micrometer-sized structures arranged in a grating pattern across a flat surface.

The spacing and shape of these structures modifies the phase and polarization of light reaching the detector.

Also known as flat optics, metasurface optics are lighter and smaller than their traditional counterparts, making them less expensive to send into orbit.

As NASA plans future Earth science missions, metasurface optics could be key to building a new generation of compact polarimeters.

“The size, weight, and mass production possibility are often quoted as advantages for metasurface optics,” said Lisa Li, a former member of the Capasso Group who played a key role in manufacturing this unique metasurface.

Lighter, smaller components easily produced at scale can reduce the overall cost of a science mission.

What makes Capasso’s metamaterial unique is its bespoke grating pattern–etched across a silica glass substrate–which splits an observed scene into distinct polarization channels.

This ability to discriminate between polarization states without bulky subsystems could allow researchers to produce a complete polarimetric system (a sorter and an imager) within a single element.

Noah Rubin, a former member of the Capasso Group and a Co-Investigator for this project, explained that this was the key achievement of their project: proving that their metasurface grating could measure signatures of polarized light with the accuracy researchers would require from a space-ready science instrument.

“We realized it would be possible to make, essentially, what we call a flat polarimeter,” said Rubin.

There is still much work to be done before NASA has a flight-ready metasurface polarimeter at its disposal, but, Rubin said, this early work sponsored by ESTO’s Instrument Incubation Program produced a scientific bedrock on which future metasurface breakthroughs will rely.

“I’d like to extend some of this work, some of this polarization sensitive imaging, to include infrared light, which is a very important wavelength regime for ice cloud remote sensing,” he said.

https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/science-enabling-technology/technology-highlights/novel-metasurface-optical-element-could-shed-new-light-on-atmospheric-aerosols/

https://opg.optica.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-30-6-9389&id=470165

Orion Deputy Program Manager Debbie Korth Receives 2025 Engineer of the Year Award

Mar 04, 2025

The National Society of Professional Engineers recently named Debbie Korth, Orion deputy program manager at Johnson Space Center, as NASA’s 2025 Engineer of the Year.

Korth was recognized during an award ceremony at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 21, alongside honorees from 17 other federal agencies.

The annual awards program honors the impactful contributions of federal engineers and their commitment to public service.

Korth said she was shocked to receive the award. “At NASA there are so many brilliant, talented engineers who I get to work with every day who are so specialized and know so much about a certain area,” she said. “It was very surprising, but very appreciated.”

Korth has dedicated more than 30 years of her career to NASA, supporting human spaceflight development, integration, and operations across the Space Shuttle, International Space Station, and Orion Programs.

Her earliest roles involved extravehicular and mission operations planning, as well as managing spaceflight hardware for shuttle missions and space station crews.

Working on hardware such as the Crew Health Care System in the early days of space station planning and development was a unique experience for Korth.

After spending significant time in Russia collaborating with Russian counterparts to integrate equipment such as a treadmill, cycle ergometer, and blood pressure monitor into their module, Korth recalled, “When we finally got that all delivered and integrated, it was a huge step because we had to have all of that on board before we could put crew members on the station for the first time.

I remember feeling a huge sense of accomplishment and happiness that we were able to work through this international partnership and forge those relationships to get that hardware integrated.”

Korth transitioned to the Orion Program in 2008 and has since served in a variety of leadership roles.

In her current role, Korth assists the program manager in the design, development, testing, verification, and certification of Orion, NASA’s next-generation, human-rated spacecraft for Artemis missions.

The spacecraft’s first flight test around the Moon during the Artemis I mission was a standout experience for Korth and a major accomplishment for the Orion team.

“It was a long mission and every day we were learning more and more about the spacecraft and pushing boundaries,” she said.

“We really wrung out some of the core systems – systems that were developed individually and for the first time we got to see them work together.”

Korth said that understanding how different systems interact with each other is what she loves most about engineering.

“In systems engineering, you really look at how changes to and the performance of one system affects everything else,” she said.

“I like looking across the entire spacecraft and saying, if I have to strengthen this structure to take some additional landing loads, that’s going to add mass to the vehicle, which means I have to look at my parachutes and the thermal protection system to make sure they can handle that increased load.”

The Orion team is working to achieve two major milestones in 2025 – delivery of the Artemis II Orion spacecraft to the Exploration Ground Systems team that will fuel and integrate Orion with its launch abort system at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, and the spacecraft’s integration with the Space Launch System rocket, which is currently being stacked.

These milestones will support the launch of the first crewed mission on NASA’s path to establishing a long-term presence at the Moon for science and exploration, with liftoff targeted no earlier than April 2026.

“It’s going to be a big year,” said Korth.

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/johnson/orion-deputy-program-manager-debbie-korth-receives-2025-engineer-of-the-year-award/

NASA, SpaceX Update Launch Date for SPHEREx, PUNCH Missions

March 3, 2025

NASA and SpaceX now are targeting no earlier than Thursday, March 6, for the launch of the agency’s SPHEREx and PUNCH missions.

The additional time will allow teams to complete vehicle processing and prelaunch checkouts.

The launch window opens at 10:09 p.m. EST (7:09 p.m. PST) from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The SPHEREx mission (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) will improve our understanding of what happened in the first second after the big bang and search for key ingredients for life in our galaxy.

The PUNCH mission (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) will observe the Sun’s corona as it transitions into the solar wind.

The prelaunch news briefing now is scheduled for 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 5, with coverage streaming live on NASA+.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/spherex/2025/03/03/nasa-spacex-update-launch-date-for-spherex-punch-missions/

NASA and Costa Rica Unite to Track Red Tides from Space

March 3, 2025

An unprecedented marine expedition in Latin America took place on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, collecting data and samples for an international study that aims to detect red tides using satellite technology.

Red tides are harmful algal blooms that can significantly impact marine ecosystems, public health, fisheries, and tourism.

Their sudden appearance and unpredictable nature make early detection essential for mitigation efforts.

The expedition, which occurred from February 17 to 21, involved biologists and oceanographers from the Costa Rican Federation of Tourist Fishing (FECOP), the University of Costa Rica (UCR), the National University (UNA), and NASA scientists, including a Costa Rican researcher.

This initiative aligns with NASA’s PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem) satellite mission, launched a year ago, which seeks to advance our understanding of ocean color and improve the monitoring of ocean ecosystems through innovative optical measurements.

“This is pioneering research in ocean optics, as such comprehensive measurements applied to ocean color validation in Costa Rica have never been done before,” said Dr. Joaquín Chaves, a Costa Rican scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

During the expedition, information was gathered using different optical sensors: a spectrometer on a research aircraft, a hyperspectral radiometer on board a ship, and PACE itself in orbit.

“The information collected in situ is triangulated to verify or validate the satellite data, and with all the information simultaneously, regional algorithms can be developed,” explained Chaves.

The objective is to create specific algorithms for the Costa Rican Pacific that will enable the prediction of red tides with greater precision.

For Dr. Marina Marrari, executive director of FECOP, this expedition “marks a milestone for science in Costa Rica.”

The ability to detect red tides in near real-time is expected to mitigate their impacts on tourism, fisheries, aquaculture, and public health.

Marrari also highlighted the collaboration between the participating organizations and the free access to the information generated through FECOP’s PezCA application.

Moreover, the expedition expanded its scope by collecting data on contaminants such as microplastics and heavy metals, as well as conducting an analysis of the microbial population structure.

Maribel Vargas, a UCR researcher, explained that the information collected will contribute to the development of new algorithms for PACE, considering the specific phytoplankton species of the region.

This research not only paves the way for improved environmental monitoring but also represents a critical step towards proactive management of coastal resources.

With enhanced predictive capabilities, local communities and industries can better prepare for and respond to the environmental and economic challenges posed by red tides, ensuring that both public health and local economies are protected.

https://ticotimes.net/2025/03/03/nasa-and-costa-rica-unite-to-track-red-tides-from-space