NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

May 6, 2025

The Doubly Warped World of Binary Black Holes

If one black hole looks strange, what about two? Light rays from accretion disks around a pair of orbiting supermassive black holes make their way through the warped space-time produced by extreme gravity in this detailed computer visualization. The simulated accretion disks have been given different false color schemes, red for the disk surrounding a 200-million-solar-mass black hole, and blue for the disk surrounding a 100-million-solar-mass black hole. For these masses, though, both accretion disks would actually emit most of their light in the ultraviolet. The video allows us to see both sides of each black hole at the same time. Red and blue light originating from both black holes can be seen in the innermost ring of light, called the photon sphere, near their event horizons. In the past decade, gravitational waves from black hole collisions have actually been detected, although the coalescence of supermassive black holes remains undiscovered.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQcKIN9vj3U

>>22998713

>Who wants to bet they are talking about the base under the Denver airport?

http://andreashaver.com/denfiles/

https://www.flydenver.com/at-the-airport/art/

Sols 4529-4531: Honeycombs and Waffles… on Mars!

May 06, 2025

Earth planning date: Friday, May 2, 2025

From our Wednesday stopping spot, the drive direction ahead (looking along the path we would follow in the Wednesday drive) appeared to be full of rough, gnarly material, which can be tricky targets for contact science instruments like APXS.

However, coming into planning this morning, we found a workspace with amazingly well preserved polygonal shaped fractures, with raised ridges (about 1 centimeter, or about 0.39 inches, high), looking like a patchwork of honeycombs, or maybe a patch of waffles.

We have spotted these before but usually not as well preserved and extensive as this — we can see these stretching away into the distance for 20-30 meters (about 66-98 feet), almost to the edge of the “boxwork” fracture structures at “Ghost Mountain” butte in this Navcam image.

We are all counting down the drives to get to the boxwork structures — this will be such an exciting campaign to be part of.

As APXS operations planner today, I was really interested to see if we could get APXS close to one of the raised ridges, to determine what they are made of.

The Rover Planners were able to get a paired set of targets — “Orosco Ridge” along a ridge and “Box Canyon” in the adjacent, flat center of the polygon.

The ChemCam team is also interested (in truth, everyone on the team is interested!!) in the composition of the ridges.

So ChemCam will use LIBS to measure both bedrock and ridge fill at “Kitchen Creek” on the first sol of the plan and “Storm Canyon” on the second sol.

The “problem” with a workspace like this is picking which images to take in our short time here, before we drive on the second sol. We could stay here for a week and still find things to look at in this workspace.

After much discussion, it was decided that MAHLI should focus on a “dog’s eye” mosaic (“Valley of the Moon”) along the vertical face of the large block.

We hope this will allow us to examine how the fractures interact with each other, and with the preexisting layering in the bedrock.

Mastcam will then focus on the two main blocks in the workspace in an 8x4 (4 rows of 8 images) Kitchen Creek mosaic, which also encompasses the LIBS target of the same name, and a single image on the Storm Canyon LIBS target.

Three smaller mosaics at “Green Valley Falls” (3x1), “Lost Palms Canyon” (7x2) and “San Andreas Fault” (1x2) will examine the relationships between the polygonal features and other fractures in the workspace, close to the rover.

Further afield, ChemCam will turn the “LD RMI” (Long-Distance Remote Micro Imager) on “Texoli” butte (the large butte to the side of the rover, visible in this image from sol 4528).

Both Mastcam and ChemCam will image the boxwork fracture system near Ghost Mountain — they are so close now, it’s just a few drives away!

Any information we get now may be able to help us answer some of the questions we have on the origin and timing of the boxwork structures, especially when we can combine it with the in situ analysis we will be getting shortly!

(Did I mention how excited we all are about this campaign?)With all the excitement today on the wild fracture structures, it could be easy to overlook Curiosity’s dataset of environmental and atmospheric data.

For more than 12 years now, we have been collecting information on dust and argon levels in the atmosphere, water and chlorine levels in the subsurface, wind speeds, humidity, temperature, ultraviolet radiation, pressure, and capturing movies and images of dust devils.

This weekend is no different, adding a full complement of activities from almost every team — Navcam, REMS, DAN, Mastcam, ChemCam, and APXS will all collect data for the environmental and atmospheric theme group (ENV) in this plan.

https://science.nasa.gov/blog/sols-4529-4531-honeycombs-and-waffles-on-mars/

Searching for Spherules to Sample

May 05, 2025

Over the past few weeks, Perseverance has been investigating some curious spherules peppered across the “Witch Hazel Hill” region along the rim of Jezero crater.

A striking cluster of the small bubble-shaped stones were first spotted by the Mastcam-Z instrument on Sol 1442 (March 11, 2025) at “Broom Point,” in a rock named “St. Pauls Bay.”

A few sols later, a similar assemblage was discovered by the SuperCam instrument at the “Mattie Mitchell” outcrop near “Puncheon Rock.”

As the rover continued along its traverse, spherules continued to appear. At the targets St. Pauls Bay and Mattie Mitchell, the spherules are densely packed and almost look like bunches of grapes.

Elsewhere, similar smaller spherules were found intermixed with other grains within the rock. At a target called “Wreck Apple” at the “Sally’s Cove” outcrop, individual spherules were set in a matrix of coarse, dark grains.

Even more of these circular features are embedded in finer-grained, layered bedrock at a nearby area called “Dennis Pond.”

Although the team was intrigued by the spherule-rich layers at Sally’s Cove and Dennis Pond, these outcrops were challenging for the rover arm to access.

After some searching to find an accessible target, the team decided to perform an abrasion at a neighboring outcrop, called “Pine Pond,” which contained an extension of the Dennis Pond layers.

The team picked the target “Hare Bay” in hopes of finding spherules within a rock interior, and conducting proximity science observations with PIXL and SHERLOC to investigate their composition and internal structure.

Images of the abrasion patch taken by WATSON show that Hare Bay contains light-toned medium-sized grains, with millimeter-sized spherules dotted throughout the rock!

Leading hypotheses for the origin of these spherules include formation by volcanic activity or impact-related processes.

Having found an accessible spherule-bearing rock, the team is currently hard at work collecting a spherule-filled sample!

Combined with the information already gathered by Mastcam-Z, SuperCam, PIXL, SHERLOC, and WATSON, future laboratory analyses could help solve the mystery of when, where, and how these spherules formed, which can in turn detangle the geological events that formed and transformed the surface of Mars over billions of years!

https://science.nasa.gov/blog/searching-for-spherules-to-sample/

Hubble Images a Peculiar Spiral

May 05, 2025

A beautiful but skewed spiral galaxy dazzles in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image.

The galaxy, called Arp 184 or NGC 1961, sits about 190 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Camelopardalis (The Giraffe).

The name Arp 184 comes from the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies compiled by astronomer Halton Arp in 1966.

It holds 338 galaxies that are oddly shaped and tend to be neither entirely elliptical nor entirely spiral-shaped.

Many of the galaxies are in the process of interacting with other galaxies, while others are dwarf galaxies without well-defined structures.

Arp 184 earned its spot in the catalog thanks to its single broad, star-speckled spiral arm that appears to stretch toward us.

The galaxy’s far side sports a few wisps of gas and stars, but it lacks a similarly impressive spiral arm.

This Hubble image combines data from three Snapshot observing programs, which are short observations that slotted into time gaps between other proposals. One of the three programs targeted Arp 184 for its peculiar appearance.

This program surveyed galaxies listed in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies as well as A Catalogue of Southern Peculiar Galaxies and Associations, a similar catalog compiled by Halton Arp and Barry Madore.

The remaining two Snapshot programs looked at the aftermath of fleeting astronomical events like supernovae and tidal disruption events — like when a supermassive black hole rips a star apart after it wanders too closely.

Since Arp 184 hosted four known supernovae in the past three decades, it is a rich target for a supernova hunt.

https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/hubble-images-a-peculiar-spiral/

NASA Kennedy Breathes Life into Moon Soil Testing

May 05, 2025

As NASA works to establish a long-term presence on the Moon, researchers have reached a breakthrough by extracting oxygen at a commercial scale from simulated lunar soil at Swamp Works at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The achievement moves NASA one step closer to its goal of utilizing resources on the Moon and beyond instead of relying only on supplies shipped from Earth.

NASA Kennedy researchers in the Exploration Research and Technology programs teamed up with Lunar Resources Inc. (LUNAR), a space industrial company in Houston, Texas, to perform molten regolith electrolysis.

Researchers used the company’s resource extraction reactor, called LR-1, along with NASA Kennedy’s vacuum chamber.

During the recent vacuum chamber testing, molecular oxygen was measured in its pure form along with the production of metals from a batch of dust and rock that simulates lunar soil, often referred to as “regolith,” in the industry.

“This is the first time NASA has produced molecular oxygen using this process,” said Dr. Annie Meier, molten regolith electrolysis project manager at NASA Kennedy.

“The process of heating up the reactor is like using an elaborate cooking pot. Once the lid is on, we are essentially watching the gas products come out.”

During testing, the vacuum environment chamber replicated the vacuum pressure of the lunar surface.

The extraction reactor heated about 55 pounds (25 kilograms) of simulated regolith up to a temperature of 3100°F (1700°C) until it melted.

Researchers then passed an electric current through the molten regolith until oxygen in a gas form was separated from the metals of the soil.

They measured and collected the molecular oxygen for further study.

In addition to air for breathing, astronauts could use oxygen from the Moon as a propellant for NASA’s lunar landers and for building essential infrastructure.

This practice of in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) also decreases the costs of deep space exploration by reducing the number of resupply missions needed from Earth.

Once the process is perfected on Earth, the reactor and its subsystems can be delivered on future missions to the Moon.

Lunar rovers, similar to NASA’s ISRU Pilot Excavator, could autonomously gather the regolith to bring back to the reactor system to separate the metals and oxygen.

“Using this unique chemical process can produce the oxidizer, which is half of the propellant mix, and it can create vital metals used in the production of solar panels that in turn could power entire lunar base stations,” said Evan Bell, mechanical structures and mechatronics lead at NASA Kennedy.

Post-test data analysis will help the NASA and LUNAR teams better understand the thermal and chemical function of full-scale molten regolith electrolysis reactors for the lunar surface.

The vacuum chamber and reactor also can be upgraded to represent other locations of the lunar environment as well as conditions on Mars for further testing.

Researchers at NASA Kennedy began developing and testing molten regolith electrolysis reactors in the early 1990s.

Swamp Works is a hands-on learning environment facility at NASA Kennedy that takes ideas through development and into application to benefit space exploration and everyone living on Earth.

From 2019 to 2023, Swamp Works developed an early concept reactor under vacuum conditions named Gaseous Lunar Oxygen from Regolith Electrolysis (GaLORE).

Scientists at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston conducted similar testing in 2023, removing carbon monoxide from simulated lunar regolith in a vacuum chamber.

“We always say that Kennedy Space Center is Earth’s premier spaceport, and this breakthrough in molten regolith electrolysis is just another aspect of us being the pioneers in providing spaceport capabilities on the Moon, Mars, and beyond,” Bell said.

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/kennedy/nasa-kennedy-breathes-life-into-moon-soil-testing/