Category: Space Exploration

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In Memoriam

Every January, NASA honors those who made the ultimate sacrifice in the pursuit of space exploration.

The Day of Remembrance provides a moment to honor and remember members of the NASA family who gave their lives in the advancement of space exploration and discovery. It also serves as an opportunity to reflect on the safety culture within the organization. This includes paying tribute to the crews of Apollo 1, the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia, and other astronauts who lost their lives in the pursuit of spaceflight

Ad astra per aspera.

On January 27, 1967, a tragic incident occurred at the Cape Kennedy launch pad during a preflight test for Apollo 204 (AS-204). This mission, intended to mark the inaugural crewed flight of Apollo, was set to launch on February 21, 1967. Veteran astronaut Gus Grissom, first American spacewalker Ed White, and rookie Roger Chaffee lost their lives as a fire engulfed the command module.

From left to right: Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.

Only 73 seconds after liftoff on the morning of January 28, 1986, a booster engine malfunction led to the tragic breakup of the shuttle Challenger, claiming the lives of all seven crew members.

Back row, from left: Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Greg Jarvis, and Judy Resnik. Front row, from left: Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, and Ron McNair.

The crew of the STS-107 mission who perished when the space shuttle Columbia broke up during re-entry on Feb. 1, 2003.

From left to right are mission specialist David Brown, commander Rick Husband, mission specialist Laurel Clark, mission specialist Kalpana Chawla, mission specialist Michael Anderson, pilot William McCool, and Israeli payload specialist Ilan Ramon.

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I Love…

…how if you just run NASA's Mars pictures from Photoshop's "Auto Color" correction they suddenly start looking amazingly earth-like.

(Click to embiggen if so desired.)

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Awesome

Japan's iSpace HAKUTO-R lander captured this stunning photo in orbit around our Moon while a solar eclipse was occurring on Earth last week. You can see the Moon's dark shadow passing above Australia as a dark smudge.

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More Strangeness From the Surface of Mars

There's just something…off…about the pictures that are coming back from the Mars rovers. I can't put my finger on it. It's definitely not that they're fake—most definitely the opposite—and that's what I find the most unnerving.

If there was once advanced life on Mars, after all these billions of years, how would we even recognize what's remains of it? If man were to disappear from the face of the Earth tomorrow, nearly all remnants of his time here would be completely erased within only a few thousand years (the Hoover dam and similar structures being the exceptions). But after millions of years? There would be no trace we were ever here.

I'm not saying that Mars has life or intelligence now, but there was plenty of time when it was hospitable for it to have arisen and then been wiped out by some incomprehensible cosmic tragedy.

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The Latest from James Webb

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope's mid-infrared view of the Pillars of Creation strikes a chilling tone. Thousands of stars that exist in this region seem to disappear, since stars typically do not emit much mid-infrared light, and seemingly endless layers of gas and dust become the centerpiece. The detection of dust by Webb's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) is extremely important – dust is a major ingredient for star formation.

Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

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The James Webb telescope turns its eye close to home by capturing its first image of Neptune, revealing the ice giant planet in a whole new light. This is the clearest view of this peculiar planet's rings in more than 30 years.

The new image, taken by Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), shows the crisp view of the planet's dynamic rings. The Webb images also clearly show Neptune's fainter dust bands.

Methane gas found inside Neptune is so strongly absorbing that the planet is quite dark at Webb wavelengths (0.6 to 5 microns) except where high-altitude clouds are present. Such clouds are prominent as bright streaks and spots, which reflect sunlight.

Webb also captured seven of Neptune's 14 known moons. Dominating this Webb portrait of Neptune is a very bright point of light sporting the signature diffraction spikes seen in many of Webb's images; it's not a star, but Neptune's most unusual moon, Triton.

Triton reflects an ~70 percent of the sunlight that hits it and orbits Neptune in a backwards orbit, leading astronomers to believe this moon was a Kuiper Belt object that was captured by Neptune. Additional Webb studies of Triton and Neptune are planned this year.

[Source]

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Science!

Take a good look: this is the black hole at the center of our galaxy.

In the inset image, gas in the glowing orange ring surrounds the black hole's event horizon, a boundary from which nothing can escape. The ring is created by light bending in the intense gravity around Sagittarius A*, which has a mass some four million times greater than our Sun. This groundbreaking image of Sagittarius A* was taken by the Event Horizon Telescope team with data from telescopes around the world. After the EHT's iconic image of M87*, released in 2019, this is only the second time a supermassive black hole has been directly observed with its shadow.

The wider look at the space around Sagittarius A* includes data contributed by several NASA missions. The orange specks and purple tendrils were captured in infrared light by the Hubble Space Telescope, and the blue clouds represent data from our orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Fall in to the whole story: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/images/sagittarius-a-nasa-telescopes-support-event-horizon-telescope-in-studying-milky-ways.html

[Source]

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I Had This…

…or some variation thereof, on my bedroom wall all through grade school. I took to drawing my own version of the planets—no doubt as fanciful as these representations, never dreaming that during the course of my life we'd actually see each one up close via robotic probes!

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Shadows at the Moon's South Pole

This is a multi-temporal illumination map made of the moon's South Pole with a wide-angle camera. To create it, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft collected 1,700 images over a period of 6 lunar days (6 Earth months), repeatedly covering an area centered on the Moon's south pole from different angles. The resulting images were stacked to produce the featured map—representing the percentage of time each spot on the surface was illuminated by the Sun. Remaining convincingly in shadow, the floor of the 19-kilometer diameter Shackleton crater is seen near the map's center. The lunar south pole itself is at about 9 o'clock on the crater's rim. Crater floors near the lunar south and north poles can remain in permanent shadow, while mountain tops can remain in nearly continuous sunlight. Useful for future outposts, the shadowed craterfloors could offer reservoirs of water-ice, while the sunlit mountain tops offer good locations to collect solar power.

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Well That's Certainly Interesting…

A few of the more intriguing photos sent back from the Mars Curiosity rover in the past few months…

NASA is bending over backward trying to explain that third picture as a natural rock formation. I haven't read anything regarding the coral-looking structures in the two two photos.

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A New Perspective

Almost everyone is familiar with this view we get of the Orion constellation:

But what most people don't realize is the varying distances everything in that constellation is from Earth. Even I'd believed that the three belt stars were somewhat near each other…