hope so
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
February 27, 2026
Sharpless 249 and the Jellyfish Nebula
Normally faint and elusive, the Jellyfish Nebula is caught in this alluring telescopic field of view. Floating in the interstellar sea, the nebula is anchored right and left by two bright stars, Mu and Eta Geminorum, at the foot of the celestial twins. The Jellyfish Nebula itself is right of center, seen as a brighter arcing ridge of emission with dangling tentacles. In fact, this cosmic jellyfish is part of bubble-shaped supernova remnant IC 443, the expanding debris cloud from a massive star that exploded. Light from the explosion first reached planet Earth over 30,000 years ago. Like its cousin in astrophysical waters the Crab Nebula supernova remnant, the Jellyfish Nebula is known to harbor a neutron star, the ultradense remnant of the collapsed stellar core. An emission nebula cataloged as Sharpless 249 fills the field at the upper left. The Jellyfish Nebula is about 5,000 light-years away. At that distance, this image would be about 300 light-years across.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8DZqqD7pHA
Schumann Resonance & The Pole Shift, Comet MAPs and More | S0 News and frens
Feb.27.2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7lWSnKnADI
https://research.noaa.gov/five-ways-noaa-scientists-helped-improve-human-and-marine-life-in-2025/
https://www.spaceweather.gov/news/swpc-now-youtube
https://www.youtube.com/@NWSSWPC (Dobsonian Power: SOMETHING BIG IS COMING FROM THE SUN!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdOVZ7hkMGE (Stefan Burns: A Large Volcanic Event with Global Fallout Could Be Just Around The Corner…)
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/aurora-viewline-tonight-and-tomorrow-night-experimental
https://x.com/MrMBB333/status/2027143175903551844
https://x.com/randallwcarlson/status/2027202756008673565
https://x.com/schumannbot/status/2027383259542274305
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/
https://spaceweather.com/
with matching Mr T tinfoil chains and ring set
First glimpse of comet 3I/ATLAS from Juice science camera
Feb 26, 2026
This striking image from the science camera on ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) shows interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS spewing dust and gas.
The tiny nucleus of the comet (not visible) is surrounded by a bright halo of gas known as the coma. A long tail stretches away from the comet, and we see hints of rays, jets, streams and filaments.
The inset in the image shows the same data, but processed to highlight the coma structure. The arrows in the top left indicate the direction in which the comet was moving (blue) and the relative direction of the Sun (yellow).
While 3I/ATLAS is a visitor from interstellar space, travelling from outside the Solar System, its behaviour is completely in line with that expected from a ‘normal’ comet.
The camera, named JANUS, took this image on 6 November 2025, just seven days after the comet made its closest approach to the Sun. At the time, Juice was about 66 million km away from the comet.
Throughout November, Juice used five of its science instruments to observe 3I/ATLAS – JANUS, MAJIS, SWI, PEP and UVS. Together, they collected information that will reveal how the comet was behaving and what it is made of.
During the months that followed the observations, Juice was on the opposite side of the Sun to Earth.
It was using its main high-gain antenna as a heat shield, and its smaller medium-gain antenna to send back data to Earth at a lower rate.
This meant that instrument teams had to wait until last week to receive the data; they are now working hard to analyse them.
In total, JANUS took more than 120 images of 3I/ATLAS across a large wavelength range. The instrument team is taking a closer look at all these images to understand what they reveal about the comet.
Meanwhile, the MAJIS and UVS teams are busy studying spectrometry data, those behind SWI are investigating data on the comet's composition, and the PEP team is digging into particle data.
Together with the ESA team working on Juice’s navigation camera, which also photographed 3I/ATLAS, they will all come together in late March to discuss their findings.
Science is slow, but as the instruments teams are now all-too-aware, good things come to those who wait. Stay tuned for an update from us.
https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2026/02/First_glimpse_of_comet_3I_ATLAS_from_Juice_science_camera
https://www.the-express.com/news/space-news/200537/new-images-alien-spaceship-comet-3i-atlas-ejecting-gas-dust
https://astrobiology.com/2026/02/hatpi-pre-perihelion-time-series-photometry-of-the-interstellar-comet-3i-atlas.html
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJDKCqultyY (Ray's Astro: LIVE: GREAT COMET 2026 | Backyard Telescope (Real-Time Sky Watch)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vSk8B87IQs (Avi Loeb: Searching For Extraterrestrial Technological Artifacts Near Earth)
https://x.com/theblackvault/status/2027044735437754392
https://x.com/d2fl/status/2027372365848473683
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGQZY7bND4k
https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/heliophysics/nasas-escapade-ready-to-study-space-weather-from-earth-to-mars/
NASA’s ESCAPADE Ready to Study Space Weather from Earth to Mars
Feb 26, 2026
Mars is not what it used to be. Once warm, watery, and blanketed by a thick atmosphere, today the Red Planet is cold, dry, and draped by a thin atmospheric veil.
The main culprit is a relentless stream of particles from the Sun, known as the solar wind. Over billions of years, the solar wind has stripped away much of the Martian atmosphere, causing the planet to cool and its surface water to evaporate.
Now, NASA’s ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) mission, which launched on Nov. 13, 2025, has turned on the science instruments that will investigate how this happened and how the Sun continues to influence the Red Planet.
The science instruments, which are all operating as of Feb. 25, also will study space weather in new ways near Earth and on the way to Mars.
At Mars, ESCAPADE’s findings could also help NASA protect future explorers from the harsh Martian conditions.
“The pioneering ESCAPADE duo will not only investigate the Sun’s role in transforming Mars into an uninhabitable planet, but also will help inform the development of space weather protocols for solar events directed at Mars during future human missions to the Red Planet,” said Joe Westlake, heliophysics division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
“By joining the heliophysics fleet of missions across the solar system, ESCAPADE will be another weather station making humans and technology in space safer and more successful.”
First of its kind
With its twin spacecraft, ESCAPADE is the first science mission to coordinate two orbiters around Mars, gaining a perspective we’ve never had before.
Together, the ESCAPADE twins will measure short-term changes in the magnetized environment around Mars, called the magnetosphere, and uncover real-time processes driving the planet’s atmospheric escape.
“Having two spacecraft is going to help us understand cause and effect — how the solar wind, when it comes to Mars, interacts with the magnetic field,” said Michele Cash, ESCAPADE program scientist at NASA Headquarters.
The ESCAPADE orbiters build on earlier Mars missions that have studied Mars' atmosphere, but with just one spacecraft.
“The ESCAPADE mission is a game changer,” said Rob Lillis, the mission’s principal investigator at the University of California, Berkeley. “It gives us what you might call a stereo perspective — two different vantage points simultaneously.”
Once ESCAPADE reaches Mars, its twin spacecraft will follow each other in the same orbit, passing over the same areas at different times to uncover when and where changes are happening.
“When we have two spacecraft crossing those regions in quick succession, we can monitor how those regions vary on timescales as short as two minutes,” Lillis said. “This will allow us to make measurements we could never make before.”
After six months, the two spacecraft will shift into different orbits, with one traveling farther from Mars and the other staying closer to it.
Planned to last for five months, this second formation aims to study the solar wind and Martian magnetosphere simultaneously, allowing scientists to investigate how Mars responds to the solar wind in real time.
“Prior spacecraft could either be in the upstream solar wind, or they could be close to the planet measuring its magnetosphere,” Lillis said, “but ESCAPADE allows us to be in two places at once and to simultaneously measure the cause and the effect.”
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Preparing for human exploration
When people set foot on Mars, they will not be as well protected from solar radiation as their family and friends on Earth.
Earth can withstand the solar wind’s ceaseless onslaught because it has a hardy magnetic field that shields us from the Sun’s energetic particles. However, Mars’ once robust magnetic field has weakened over time.
Today it’s a patchwork of localized magnetism in the planet’s crust along with an ever-changing magnetic field generated by the solar wind’s interaction with charged particles in Mars’ upper atmosphere.
This “hybrid” magnetosphere provides little protection against the atmosphere-stripping force of the solar wind. This, plus Mars’ thin atmosphere, allows the Sun’s energetic particles to easily reach the Martian surface, endangering future human explorers there.
“Before we send humans to Mars, we need to understand what type of environment these astronauts are going to encounter,” Cash said.
Additionally, ESCAPADE will provide more information about Mars’ ionosphere — part of the upper atmosphere that future astronauts will use to send radio and navigation signals around the planet, as we do on Earth.
“If we ever want GPS at Mars or long-distance communications, we need to understand the ionosphere,” Lillis said.
Unique journey to Mars
Previous Mars missions have launched when Earth and Mars are aligned in their orbits, which only happens every 26 months. But ESCAPADE launched early, pioneering a new strategy that allows Mars-bound spacecraft to launch almost anytime.
Instead of heading directly to Mars, ESCAPADE’s spacecraft are first looping around a location in space a million miles from Earth called Lagrange point 2.
In November 2026, when Earth and Mars are aligned, the ESCAPADE spacecraft will return to Earth and use our planet’s gravity to slingshot themselves toward Mars for a September 2027 arrival.
This unique “loiter” orbit will extend approximately 2 million miles from our planet, making the ESCAPADE spacecraft the first to fly through a previously unexplored region of Earth’s distant magnetotail, part of Earth’s magnetosphere opposite the Sun.
“We’re going to be doing some discovery science,” Lillis said. “No one has ever measured Earth’s tail this far away.”
Later, during their 10-month cruise to Mars, ESCAPADE’s two spacecraft will study solar wind and the interplanetary magnetic environment that Mars-bound astronauts will also traverse, preparing for future journeys to the Red Planet.
The ESCAPADE mission is funded by NASA’s Heliophysics Division and is part of the NASA Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration program.
UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory leads the mission with key partners Rocket Lab; NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University; Advanced Space; and Blue Origin.
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