NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

July 29, 2025

A Helix Nebula Deep Field

Is the Helix Nebula looking at you? No, not in any biological sense, but it does look quite like an eye. The Helix Nebula is so named because it also appears that you are looking down the axis of a helix. In actuality, it is now understood to have a surprisingly complex geometry, including radial filaments and extended outer loops. The Helix Nebula (aka NGC 7293) is one of brightest and closest examples of a planetary nebula, a gas cloud created at the end of the life of a Sun-like star. The remnant central stellar core, destined to become a white dwarf star, glows in light so energetic it causes the previously expelled gas to fluoresce. The featured picture, taken in red, green, and blue but highlighted by light emitted primarily by hydrogen was created from 12 hours of exposure through a personal telescope located in Greece. A close-up of the inner edge of the Helix Nebula shows complex gas knots the origin of which are still being researched.

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

Roscosmos and NASA reconnect: First high-level meeting since 2018

Tue, July 29, 2025 - 16:50

The Director General of Roscosmos, Dmytro Bakanov, arrived in Houston, where on July 31, he will meet with the acting head of NASA, Sean Duffy, according to Russian media and Reuters.

The media writes that the Director General of the Russian state corporation Roscosmos, Dmytro Bakanov, has arrived in Houston, Texas, for a meeting with the acting Administrator of NASA, Sean Duffy.

This is the first such meeting between the heads of the space agencies of the United States and the Russian Federation in eight years.

The negotiations are scheduled to take place on July 31. They will discuss the continued operation of the International Space Station, continuation of cross-flights, and the process of deorbiting the station.

Also, the Russian delegation plans to visit the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, the production facilities of Boeing and SpaceX. Additionally, a meeting with the crew of the Crew Dragon spacecraft is scheduled.

As Reuters notes, the space program remains one of the few international projects in which the United States and Russia still cooperate.

In all other spheres, relations between the countries were severed after the beginning of the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation into Ukraine in February 2022.

Despite political isolation, NASA and Roscosmos continue to exchange crews for missions to the ISS.

This takes place within the framework of the so-called cross-flight program, which allows maintaining a constant presence of representatives of both countries on the station.

Relations between the USA and the Russian Federation

The last meeting of the heads of Roscosmos and NASA took place in October 2018.

Then, the head of NASA, Jim Bridenstine, came to Russia on the eve of the launch of the Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft.

He was hosted by the then-head of Roscosmos, Dmytro Rogozin.

After the full-scale invasion of Russia into Ukraine, the USA imposed large-scale sanctions against the Russian Federation, which also affected the space sector.

As a result, most joint projects and contacts between American and Russian structures were curtailed or frozen.

However, in the space sector, certain cooperation has been preserved – in particular, to support the safe operation of the International Space Station (ISS).

https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/russian-navy-tests-new-sea-drone-ukraine-1753796629.html

https://news.az/news/russian-space-chief-visits-us-for-first-talks-with-nasa-since-2018

NASA-ISRO’s NISAR Earth Satellite Ready for Launch

July 28, 2025

The NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) mission, a collaboration between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), is set to launch at 8:10 a.m. EDT (5:40 p.m. IST), Wednesday, July 30, from Satish Dhawan Space Centre on India’s southeastern coast aboard an ISRO Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle rocket.

About the length of a pickup truck, the satellite will provide high-resolution data to help decision-makers, communities, and scientists monitor major infrastructure and agricultural fields, refine understanding of natural hazards such as landslides and earthquakes, and help teams prepare for and respond to disasters like hurricanes, floods, and volcanic eruptions.

Enabling NISAR to do this is the first-of-its-kind dual-radar payload it carries — an L-band system with a 10-inch (25-centimeter) wavelength and an S-band system with a 4-inch (10-centimeter) wavelength.

Each system’s signal is sensitive to different sizes of features on Earth’s surface, and each specializes in measuring different attributes, such as moisture content, surface roughness, and motion.

These characteristics are important for studying a variety of natural surface conditions, such as the amount of soil moisture available for vegetation to thrive or if land has subsided over time.

The spacecraft will circle Earth 14 times a day, scanning nearly all the planet’s land and ice surfaces twice every 12 days.

The launch broadcast begins at 7 a.m. EDT, Wednesday, July 30, from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where the U.S. portion of the mission is staged.

Watch live coverage of the launch on NASA+ and the agency’s YouTube channel. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of platforms, including social media.

https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/nisar/2025/07/28/nasa-isros-nisar-earth-satellite-ready-for-launch/

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/nisar/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waTmU9hyOqo

Curiosity Blog, Sols 4609–4610: Recharged and Ready To Roll Onwards

Jul 28, 2025

Earth planning date: Wednesday, July 23, 2025

For today’s planning, we were in the same workspace as the Monday plan — on purpose!

We don’t often have a plan without a drive but in order to allow the battery to recover from some power-hungry SAM atmospheric measurements over the weekend and on Monday, we needed to stay put and skip our usual drive.

As a result, we gained a bonus planning cycle at this interesting workspace.

We are in one of the “hollows” between the resistant ridges of the “boxwork” terrain, as you can see in the image for this blog.

This made for a quieter Operations day for me as the APXS planner. As Deborah noted in Monday’s blog, we have already gotten three APXS and MAHLI measurements in this workspace, so we didn’t acquire more in this plan.

This morning, we focused on documenting some small light-toned, rounded, white pebbles in the workspace (you can see them in the accompanying Navcam image), which look very different from the underlying bedrock.

We used our one ChemCam LIBS analysis for the plan on "Yana Qaqa.” Mastcam will image this pebble, another at “Ojos del Salado,” and a really cool-looking target with a dendritic-looking texture at “Punta de Lobos.”

Further afield, Mastcam will image the adjacent boxwork ridge and hollow in our drive direction, and a series of troughs with raised edges to the right of our current workspace.

ChemCam will image a long-distance RMI mosaic of “Cueva de los Vencejos y Murciélagos,” which was imaged by Mastcam on Monday, and also acquire some further images of the "Mishe Mokwa" hill.

We had a bumper couple of sols of atmospheric measurements over the weekend and Monday. Now we revert back to our more normal environmental and atmospheric monitoring.

These do not get as much attention sometimes as the amazing images we take of the fascinating rocks we see, but have been taking place consistently and continuously since Curiosity’s landing almost 13 years ago now.

This plan includes a series of Navcam movies (suprahorizon, dust devil) and a line-of-sight observation of dust, standard REMS and DAN observations, and two Mastcam tau measurements, looking at dust in the atmosphere.

Our 24-meter drive (almost 79 feet) will take us out of this hollow and back up on top of a ridge. From here, we hope to be able to spy the best driving path through the boxwork.

The ridges are up to 5 meters in diameter (about 16 feet), so we are cautiously hopeful that we can just trundle along one of the ridges as we investigate this fascinating terrain.

https://science.nasa.gov/blog/curiosity-blog-sols-4609-4610-recharged-and-ready-to-roll-onwards/

>>23398558

Curiosity Blog, Sols 4611-4613: Scenic Overlook

Jul 28, 2025

Earth planning date: Friday, July 25, 2025

A 23-meter drive (about 75 feet) brought Curiosity to today's planned “look-about” spot.

The highlight of the plan will be the 360-degree Mastcam panorama that will document the ridge-and-hollow topography of the boxwork-forming unit we've been exploring, in addition to overlying stratigraphy in some of the nearby buttes.

The right-angle ridge pattern is quite prominent in the HiRISE orbital imaging, which enabled us to plan for this stop. It has been 70 sols since the last panorama, and the rover has driven quite some distance in that time!

Additional detailed imaging was planned with the ChemCam remote imager (RMI) and Mastcam high-resolution M100: mosaics will cover the exposed strata underneath the ridge we're planning to drive on (“Arequipa Airport”), two linear fractures, one parallel to the large ridge and one cross-cutting it (“Laguna de Salinas” and “Laguna Santa Rosa”), some troughs around a nearby light-toned float block (“Arubai”), and the Uyuni butte in the middle distance.

The bedrock texture here was a noticeable change from the previous workspace, with a knobbly oriented texture interspersed occasionally with platier exposures.

Geochemical measurements were planned with the ChemCam LIBS to complement the auto-targeted post-drive AEGIS measurement: “La Coca” on a block that appeared to show unusual colors, and “El Algodón” on a knobbly textured chunk of bedrock.

APXS geochemistry was planned with dust removal on the “Yura Tuff” knobbly target and without dust removal on the “Tipnis” target. MAHLI will also provide close-up imaging on the two APXS targets.

For the modern Martian environment, it's still the cloudy season at Gale so we are planning several cloud-related activities.

The Mastcam sky survey will measure abundances of atmospheric dust and water ice, whereas a special cloud altitude observation will include video of clouds and their shadows so that the altitudes and velocities of the clouds and related winds can be calculated.

A separate short movie will search for dust lifting (dust devil) activity. Finally, the usual passive REMS and DAN observations will monitor the temperature, humidity, and neutron environment at Curiosity's current location.

https://science.nasa.gov/blog/curiosity-blog-sols-4611-4613-scenic-overlook/