NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

September 17, 2025

Nebulas and Clusters in Sagittarius

Can you spot famous celestial objects in this image? 18th-century astronomer Charles Messier cataloged only two of them: the bright Lagoon Nebula (M8) at the bottom, and the colorful Trifid Nebula (M20) at the upper right. The one on the left that resembles a cat's paw is NGC 6559, and it is much fainter than the other two. Even harder to spot are the thin blue filaments on the left, from supernova remnant (SNR G007.5-01.7). Their glow comes from small amounts of glowing oxygen atoms that are so faint that it took over 17 hours of exposure with just one blue color to bring up. Framing this scene of stellar birth and death are two star clusters: the open cluster M21 just above Trifid, and the globular cluster NGC 6544 at lower left.

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

>>23613936

Thats all she's got?

NASA, Northrop Grumman Assessing Cygnus XL Engine Burn Plan

September 16, 2025

NASA and Northrop Grumman are delaying the arrival of the Cygnus XL to the International Space Station as flight controllers evaluate an alternate burn plan for the resupply spacecraft.

The Cygnus XL will not arrive to the space station on Wednesday, Sept. 17, as originally planned, with a new arrival date and time under review.

Early Tuesday morning, Cygnus XL’s main engine stopped earlier than planned during two burns designed to raise the orbit of the spacecraft for rendezvous with the space station, where it will deliver 11,000 pounds of scientific investigations and cargo to the orbiting laboratory for NASA.

All other Cygnus XL systems are performing normally.

NASA astronaut Jonny Kim is scheduled to capture Cygnus XL using the station’s Canadarm2 robotic arm with backup support from NASA astronaut Zena Cardman.

After capture, the spacecraft will be installed on the Unity module’s Earth-facing port and will remain at the space station until March 2026.

The spacecraft launched at 6:11 p.m. on Sept. 14 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

The mission is known as NASA’s Northrop Grumman Commercial Resupply Services 23, or Northrop Grumman CRS-23.

https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/spacestation/2025/09/16/nasa-northrop-grumman-assessing-cygnus-xl-engine-burn-plan/

>>23613548

NASA, Partners Push Forward with Remotely Piloted Airspace Integration

Sep 16, 2025

NASA and its partners recently tested a tool for remotely piloted operations that could enable operators to transport people and goods more efficiently within urban areas.

The team’s goal is to ensure that when these remotely piloted aircraft – including electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles (eVTOLs) – take to the skies, air traffic controllers won’t be overburdened by increased flight operations and safety is maintained across the national airspace.

On Aug. 21, NASA’s Air Traffic Management eXploration Project (ATM-X) assisted Wisk Aero when they flew a Bell 206 helicopter in Hollister, California.

The purpose of the flight test was to evaluate and fine-tune a ground-based radar developed by Collins Aerospace. The radar, which provides aircraft location data, could be used during future remotely piloted operations to detect and avoid other aircraft in the vicinity.  

NASA, Wisk, and Collins researchers also used the flight to test data exchange capabilities across different geographic locations between the groups, a critical capability for future remotely piloted operators in a shared airspace.

This work builds on a November 2024 flight test NASA performed with Reliable Robotics and Collins Aerospace.

Initial analysis of the August testing of Collins’ ground-based radar actively and accurately surveilled the airspace during the aircraft’s flight test.

The Collins radar system also successfully transmitted these data to NASA’s Mission Visualization Research Command Center lab at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.

NASA, Wisk, and Collins will further analyze the flight data to better understand the radar’s performance and data exchange capabilities for future remotely piloted flight tests.

This testing is a part of ATM-X’s remotely piloted testing campaign, designed to identify the infrastructure and technologies needed for the Federal Aviation Administration to safely integrate drones and air taxis into the airspace, bringing the movement of people and goods off the ground, and into the sky.

Remotely piloted eVTOL aircraft could bridge the gap for urban communities by offering a more affordable and accessible method of transportation and delivery services in congested, highly-populated areas.

NASA and Wisk will continue to collaborate on emerging eVTOL technologies to safely integrate advanced aircraft, into the national airspace.

Together, the teams will gather data on eVTOL performance and characteristics during a flight test of a helicopter, which will act as a “surrogate” simulating an eVTOL flight.

This work will mark another critical step towards better connecting communities across the globe.

https://www.nasa.gov/aeronautics/nasa-partners-push-forward-with-remotely-piloted-airspace-integration/

An Eye-catching Star Cluster

Sep 16, 2025

Westerlund 1, the biggest and closest “super” star cluster to Earth, dazzles in this image released on July 23, 2025.

This view combines x-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (in pink, blue, purple, and orange), infrared data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (in yellow, gold, and blue), and optical data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (in cyan, grey, and light yellow).

Data from Chandra and other telescopes is helping astronomers delve deeper into this galactic factory where stars are vigorously being produced.

Observations from Chandra have uncovered thousands of individual stars pumping out X-ray emission into the cluster.

This image is part of a compilation of images featuring data from Chandra along with a host of other telescopes.

https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/an-eye-catching-star-cluster/

https://chandra.si.edu/photo/2025/cosmic/

>>23614089

>NASA does not do space shit anymore because the jig is up.

Got a piece just for that. They're transitioning.

NASA is no longer a space agency. Its new official status is pretty shocking. Here's what happened

Updated: Sep 17, 2025, 15:09 IST

Story highlights

NASA is not a space agency any more, at least not on paper. An executive order quietly changed things for NASA.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has lowered the budget for NASA for 2026, but the president wants to reach the Moon and Mars.

A new order by the Trump administration issued late last month states that NASA will operate as a national intelligence and security agency.

According to it, the space agency will now have a different set of primary functions, which includes "intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work."

The revelation was made by NASA Watch founder Keith Cowing, as the issue didn't exactly make headlines at the time.

Keith was once a scientist at the space agency, and now closely watches everything that happens there.

So, does this mean that NASA will go forward and develop spycraft instead of spacecraft? According to reports, the order is more about labour concerns rather than about the work NASA does.

A report from Futurism states that the order adds "NASA to the Federal Service Labour-Management Relations Statute (FSLMRS), excluding it from collective bargaining representation."

This sparked discontent among NASA employees, who staged a protest outside NASA's Washington, DC, headquarters earlier this week.

The change in the status of the space agency came as the president eliminated the union rights for thousands of federal employees. Several lawsuits had been filed to stop the order. As this news made headlines, the thing about NASA becoming a spy agency was sidelined.

However, that is expected to have labour implications for the people working at the agency. Government Executive quoted the vice president of the Goddard Engineers, Scientists and Technicians Association, Monica Gorman, as telling those gathered at the protest, “A huge part of the reason that I have that independence, and that my colleagues do, is that as a union-represented worker I know that I am protected from unfair retaliation.”

Donald Trump has already announced a lower budget for NASA in the year 2026. On May 2, the Trump administration proposed cutting NASA funding by nearly 25 per cent.

This will reduce the money allocated from $24.8 billion to $18.8 billion. Most of this reduction will affect the agency's science programs.

According to The Planetary Society, a nonprofit exploration advocacy organisation, the 2026 budget would be the agency's lowest since 1961.

Trump is instead interested in militarising space, as appears from his "Golden Dome" missile defence program. According to Sean Duffy, the acting chief of NASA, Trump wants to send men to the Moon before China.

He said during a press conference that Trump is also eager to reach for Mars. Just last month, Duffy said that NASA will give up on "all of these Earth sciences."

Duffy recently stressed that NASA's Artemis mission is a go, although there are fears that China will make it there before the US.

https://www.wionews.com/trending/nasa-is-no-longer-a-space-agency-its-new-official-status-is-pretty-shocking-here-s-what-happened-1758101223444

>>23614128

playing with velcro, probably

Regions on Asteroid Explored by NASA’s Lucy Mission Get Official Names

Sep 16, 2025

The IAU (International Astronomical Union), an international non-governmental research organization and global naming authority for celestial objects, has approved official names for features on Donaldjohanson, an asteroid NASA’s Lucy spacecraft visited on April 20.

In a nod to the fossilized inspiration for the names of the asteroid and spacecraft, the IAU’s selections recognize significant sites and discoveries on Earth that further our understanding of humanity’s origins.

The asteroid was named in 2015 after paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, discoverer of one of the most famous fossils ever found of a female hominin, or ancient human ancestor, nicknamed Lucy.

Just as the Lucy fossil revolutionized our understanding of human evolution, NASA’s Lucy mission aims to revolutionize our understanding of solar system evolution by studying at least eight Trojan asteroids that share an orbit with Jupiter.

Donaldjohanson, located in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, was a target for Lucy because it offered an opportunity for a comprehensive “dress rehearsal” for Lucy’s main mission, with all three of its science instruments carrying out observation sequences very similar to the ones that will occur at the Trojans.

After exploring the asteroid and getting to see its features up close, the Lucy science and engineering team proposed to name the asteroid's surface features in recognition of significant paleoanthropological sites and discoveries, which the IAU accepted.

The smaller lobe is called Afar Lobus, after the Ethiopian region where Lucy and other hominin fossils were found. The larger lobe is named Olduvai Lobus, after the Tanzanian river gorge that has also yielded many important hominin discoveries.

The asteroid’s neck, Windover Collum, which joins those two lobes, is named after the Windover Archeological Site near Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida — where NASA’s Lucy mission launched in 2021.

Human remains and artifacts recovered from that site revolutionized our understanding of the people who lived in Florida around 7,300 years ago.

Two smooth areas on the asteroid’s neck are named Hadar Regio, marking the specific site of Johanson’s discovery of the Lucy fossil, and Minatogawa Regio, after the location where the oldest known hominins in Japan were found.

Select boulders and craters on Donaldjohanson are named after notable fossils ranging from pre-Homo sapiens hominins to ancient modern humans. The IAU also approved a coordinate system for mapping features on this uniquely shaped small world.

As of Sept. 9, the Lucy spacecraft was nearly 300 million miles (480 million km) from the Sun en route to its August 2027 encounter with its first Trojan asteroid called Eurybates.

This places Lucy about three quarters of the way through the main asteroid belt. Since its encounter with Donaldjohanson, Lucy has been cruising without passing close to any other asteroids, and without requiring any trajectory correction maneuvers.

The team continues to carefully monitor the instruments and spacecraft as it travels farther from the Sun into a cooler environment.

https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/regions-on-asteroid-explored-by-nasas-lucy-mission-get-official-names/

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