Darth Vader and other Star Wars characters from the 501st Legion address students and sponsors in the Center for Space Education at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Teams from across the state of Florida were gathered at Kennedy for the finals of the Zero Robotics Middle School Summer Program national championship. The five-week program allows rising sixth- through ninth-graders to write programs for small satellites called SPHERES (Synchronized, Position, Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites). Finalists saw their code tested aboard the International Space Station.
A middle-school student high-fives a Star Wars character from the 501st Legion in the Center for Space Education at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Teams from across the state of Florida were gathered at Kennedy for the finals of the Zero Robotics Middle School Summer Program national championship. The five-week program allows rising sixth- through ninth-graders to write programs for small satellites called SPHERES (Synchronized, Position, Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites). Finalists saw their code tested aboard the International Space Station.
Smoke from the wildfires in Canada's Northwest Territories, as well as British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba are seen in this image from the Suomi NPP satellite. The smoke spewing from the fires has been swept up by the jet stream and is being carried across the continent. The largest fires seem to be in the Northern Territories. Fire is worrisome enough but the smoke that is produced from wildfires is extremely dangerous. Wind patterns have the ability to move smoke and dangerous particles across continents to affect people in far-flung parts of the world. The hotter the fire is the higher the smoke goes into the atmosphere and the farther it can travel. Winds in the upper atmosphere are stronger and allow the smoke to travel greater distances.
Smoke from extremely hot wildfires can even trigger massive thunderstorms, as they did in August of 2014 in Canada's Northern Territories. Once in the stratosphere, above the part of the atmosphere where weather occurs, aerosol particles can travel long distances. In a case from 2010, the smoke from a massive thunderstorm triggered by Russian wildfires reached the eastern United States. The smoke stayed in the stratosphere for a long time because it was above the part of the atmosphere where weather occurs, so it was not able to rain or fall out easily.
There is some comfort, however, if you aren't able to smell the smoke. Chances are the smoke most likely won't negatively affect you, but always check the Air Quality Index in your area to be sure, especially if the skies seem hazy. If you do smell smoke, take precautions to avoid it.
The Suomi NPP satellite's Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument captured a look at multiple fires, smoke from those fires, and cloud cover over northern Canada on August 14, 2017. The Suomi NPP satellite is a joint mission between NASA and NOAA.
Image Credit: NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team.
Caption Credit: NASA/Goddard, Lynn Jenner with information from NASA stories cited above.
Release Date: August 15, 2017#NASA #Earth #Science #Space #Satellite #Smoke #Wildfires #Fires #Atmosphere #Clouds #Canada #BritishColumbia #NorthwestTerritories #Alberta #Saskatchewan #Manitoba #UnitedStates #NorthAmerica #EarthObservation #NOAA #SuomiNPP #VIIRS #MODIS #Goddard #GSFC #STEM #Education
U.S. Astronaut Peggy Whitson: "Over 638 days in space and the view is still amazing! Soaking up some sunset time in the cupola…"
NASA Astronaut Peggy Whitson's Official Biography:
http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/whitson.pdf
The Cupola is a panoramic control tower for the International Space Station, a dome-shaped module with windows through which operations on the outside of the station can be observed and guided. It is a pressurized observation and work area that accommodates command and control workstations and other hardware. Through the robotics workstation, astronauts control the station’s robotic arm, which helps with the attachment and assembly of station elements much like the operator of a building crane perched in a control cabin. Crew members in the Cupola can communicate with other crew members in another part of the station or outside during spacewalk activities. Spacewalks can be observed from the Cupola along with visiting spacecraft and external areas of the station with the Cupola offering a viewing spectrum of 360 degrees.
Credit: NASA
Release Date: August 6, 2017#NASA #Space #ISS #Earth #Astronaut #PeggyWhitson #Commander #Leader #Scientist #USA #UnitedStates #Science #Sunset #Cupola #Spacecraft #Technology #Engineering #Human #Spaceflight #Expedition52 #JSC #STEM #Education #Mars #JourneyToMars
U.S. Astronaut Jack Fischer: "I’m so proud to be a part of this international team—Expedition 52"
The Expedition 52 crew poses for a unique portrait. Pictured clockwise from top right are, Flight Engineers Paolo Nespoli, Jack Fischer, Peggy Whitson, Sergey Ryazanskiy, Randy Bresnik and Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin.
Credit: NASA/JSC
Release Date: August 12, 2017#NASA #ISS #Earth #Science #Planet #Cosmonauts #Astronauts #Crew #Roscosmos #Роскосмос #ESA #Italy #Italia #CSA #JAXA #JackFischer #Flight #Engineers #Commander #FyodorYurchikhin #Human #Spaceflight #Expedition52 #UnitedStates #JSC #International #Cooperation #OverviewEffect #OrbitalPerspective #STEM
#Education
Composite image showing Hurricane Gert in the Atlantic, from 09:00 UTC on Tuesday, August 15, 2017.
For more information, visit the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System (GDACS) web site: http://www.gdacs.org
Infrared data from the geostationary satellites of EUMETSAT and NOAA overlays a computer-generated model of the Earth, containing NASA's Blue Marble Next Generation imagery.
Credit & Copyright: 2017 EUMETSAT
Image Date: August 15, 2017#NASA #EUMETSAT #Satellite #Space #Earth #Hurricane #Gert #Storm #Atlantic #Ocean #Weather #Meteorology #Infrared #BlueMarble #Goddard #GSFC #NOAA #UnitedStates #Europe #STEM #Education
Aug. 15, 2017: Typhoon Banyan's eye became visible again in satellite imagery from NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite. A visible image showed powerful storms tightly wound around Typhoon Banyan's center as it moved through the Pacific Ocean. On Aug. 15 at 01:48 UTC (Aug. 14 at 9:48 p.m. EDT the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument aboard NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite provided a visible look at Banyan. The VIIRS image showed a tight concentration of strong thunderstorms around the center of circulation. The visible image also showed Banyan's eye had become visible again, although it appeared ragged. The previous day, the eye was covered by high clouds and was only seen in microwave imagery.
At 11 a.m. EDT (1500 UTC) on August 15, Typhoon Banyan's maximum sustained winds were near 85 knots (97.8 mph/157.4 kph). The storm was located about 515 nautical miles east-northeast of the Minami Tori Shima Atoll, near 29.3 degrees north latitude and 162.6 degrees east longitude. It was moving to the north at 13 knots (15 mph/25 kph).
The Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) forecast calls for Banyan to track northeastward as it rounds the western edge of a sub-tropical ridge (elongated area) of high pressure. JTWC forecasters noted that vertical wind shear will increase as a shortwave trough (elongated area) of low pressure approaches Banyan, and it will weaken the storm. After 11 p.m. EDT on August 15, the storm will move into cooler sea surface temperatures that will also sap the storm's strength.
By August 17 the storm is expected to become a strong extra-tropical storm in the open waters of the Northwestern Pacific Ocean.
Credits: NOAA/NASA Goddard MODIS Rapid Response Team
Release Date: August 15, 2017#NASA #Earth #Science #Satellite #Space #Typhoon #Banyan #Storm #Pacific #Ocean #Weather #Meteorology #SuomiNPP #VIIRS #NOAA #Goddard #GSFC #UnitedStates #STEM #Education
U.S. Astronaut Randy Bresnik: "Nestled between the continent of Africa and Madagascar the stunning Mayotte Island is ringed by its eye-catching reef."
Mayotte is an insular department and region of France officially named the Department of Mayotte. It consists of a main island, Grande-Terre (or Maore), a smaller island, Petite-Terre (or Pamanzi), and several islets around these two. The archipelago is located in the northern Mozambique Channel in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Southeast Africa, between northwestern Madagascar and northeastern Mozambique. (Source: Wikipedia)
Visit Mayotte:
http://us.france.fr/en/discover/mayotte-0
Credit: NASA/JSC
Release Date: August 14, 2017#NASA #ISS #Earth #Science #Planet #Mayotte #Island #Reef #Archipelago #France #IndianOcean #Mozambique #Africa #Astronaut #RandyBresnik #Human #Spaceflight #Expedition52 #JSC #OverviewEffect #OrbitalPerspective #STEM
#Education
Assembled using raw uncalibrated red, green, and violet filtered images of Saturn taken by the Cassini spacecraft on August 12, 2017.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Kevin M. Gill
Image Date: August 12, 2017
Release Date: August 14, 2017#NASA #Astronomy #Science #Space #Saturn #Planet #Rings #Moon #Gravity #DensityWaves #SolarSystem #Exploration #Cassini #Spacecraft #JPL #Pasadena #California #UnitedStates #ESA #ASI #STEM #Education
A substantial coronal hole rotated into a position where it is facing Earth (Aug. 9-11, 2017). Coronal holes are areas of open magnetic field that spew out charged particles as solar wind that spreads into space. If that solar wind interacts with our own magnetosphere it can generate aurora. In this view of the sun in extreme ultraviolet light, the coronal hole appears as the dark stretch near the center of the sun. It was the most distinctive feature on the sun over the past week.
Credit: Solar Dynamics Observatory, NASA
Capture Date: August 9, 2017
Release Date: August 14, 2017#NASA #Astronomy #Science #Space #SpaceWeather #Sun #Solar #Corona #CoronalHole #Plasma #MagneticField #Earth #Magnetosphere #Aurora #Astrophysics #Spacecraft #SDO #Goddard #GSFC #Greenbelt #Maryland #UnitedStates #STEM #Education
Greenland is best known for its ice, but some remote sensing scientists found themselves closely tracking a sizable wildfire burning along the island’s coast in August 2017. The fire burned in western Greenland, about 150 kilometers (90 miles) northeast of Sisimiut.
Satellites first detected evidence of the fire on July 31, 2017. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on Suomi NPP collected daily images of smoke streaming from the fire over the next week. The Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured this more detailed image of the fire on August 3, 2017.
While it is not unprecedented for satellites to observe fire activity in Greenland, a preliminary analysis by Stef Lhermitte of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands suggests that MODIS has detected far more fire activity in Greenland in 2017 than it did during any other year since the sensor began collecting data in 2000.
Fires detected in Greenland by MODIS are usually small, most likely campfires lit by hunters or backpackers. But Landsat did capture imagery of another sizable fire in August 2015. According to Ruth Mottram of the Danish Meteorological Institute (DNI), neither DNI nor other scientific groups maintain detailed records of fire activity in Greenland, but many meteorologists at the institute have heard anecdotal reports of fires.
The blaze appears to be burning through peat, noted Miami University scientist Jessica McCarty. That would mean the fire likely produced a sharp increase in wildfire-caused carbon dioxide emissions in Greenland for 2017, noted atmospheric scientist Mark Parrington of the European Commission’s
Copernicus program.
It is not clear what triggered this fire, though a lack of documented lightning prior to its ignition suggests the fire was probably triggered by human activity. The area is regularly used by reindeer hunters, and is not too far from a town with a population of 5,500 people.
The summer has been quite dry. Sisimiut saw almost no rain in June and half of the usual amount in July. That may have parched dwarf willows, shrubs, grasses, mosses, and other vegetation that commonly live in Greenland’s coastal areas and made them more likely to burn.
Fires emit a soot-like material called black carbon. It is likely that winds will transport some of this material east to the ice sheet where it will contribute to a line of darkened snow and ice along the western edge of Greenland’s ice sheet. This area is of interest to climate scientists because darkened snow and ice tends to melt more rapidly than when it is clean.
Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland, with information from Ruth Mottram (Danish Meteorological Institute), Jessica McCarty (Miami University), Mark Parrington (COPERNICUS), and Stef Lhermitte (Delft University of Technology).
Instrument(s): Landsat 8 - OLI
Image Date: August 3, 2017
Release Date: August 7, 2017#NASA #Earth #Science #Satellite #Greenland #Grønland #Wildfire #Smoke #Sisimiut #Island #Landsat #Landsat8 #OLI #USGS #EarthObservation #ClimateChange #Climate #Environment #Denmark #Danmark #STEM #Education
Aug. 9, 2017: Given adequate sunlight and nutrients, phytoplankton populations can swell into blooms large enough to be visible from space. On August 3, 2017, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired this image of several blooms in the Caspian Sea.
Phytoplankton blooms are often harmless, and are an important food source for marine life. Other times, blooms can be harmful; they can deplete the water’s oxygen and suffocate marine life, and produce toxins that can be harmful to both aquatic creatures and humans.
Lake Urmia is visible west of the Caspian Sea. Microscopic organisms periodically turn the lake’s salty water striking shades of red and orange.
The Caspian Sea is the largest enclosed inland body of water on Earth by area, variously classed as the world's largest lake or a full-fledged sea. It is in an endorheic basin (a basin without outflows) located between Europe and Asia. It is bounded by Kazakhstan to the northeast, Russia to the northwest, Azerbaijan to the west, Iran to the south, and Turkmenistan to the southeast.
(Source: Wikipedia)
Image Credit: NASA images by Norman Kuring, NASA’s Ocean Color web Caption Credit: Adam Voiland
Instrument(s): Aqua - MODIS
Image Date: August 3, 2017
Release Date: August 9, 2017#NASA #Earth #Science #Satellite #CaspianSea #Phytoplankton #Bloom #LakeUrmia #Asia #Europe #EarthObservation #Aqua #MODIS #Goddard #GSFC #UnitedStates #STEM #Education
The aurora and the night sky above Earth’s atmosphere are pictured from the International Space Station. A portion of the station’s solar arrays and a pair of nitrogen/oxygen recharge system tanks are pictured in the foreground.
Credit: NASA/JSC
Image Date: June 19, 2017
#NASA #ISS #Earth #Science #Aurora #Planet #Atmosphere #EarthObservation #Photography #Astronaut #Human #Spaceflight #Expedition52 #UnitedStates #JSC #OverviewEffect #OrbitalPerspective #STEM
#Education
Aug. 10, 2017: In 1887, American astronomer Lewis Swift discovered a glowing cloud, or nebula, that turned out to be a small galaxy about 2.2 billion light years from Earth. Today, it is known as the “starburst” galaxy IC 10, referring to the intense star formation activity occurring there.
More than a hundred years after Swift’s discovery, astronomers are studying IC 10 with the most powerful telescopes of the 21st century. New observations with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory reveal many pairs of stars that may one day become sources of perhaps the most exciting cosmic phenomenon observed in recent years: gravitational waves.
By analyzing Chandra observations of IC 10 spanning a decade, astronomers found over a dozen black holes and neutron stars feeding off gas from young, massive stellar companions. Such double star systems are known as “X-ray binaries” because they emit large amounts of X-ray light. As a massive star orbits around its compact companion, either a black hole or neutron star, material can be pulled away from the giant star to form a disk of material around the compact object. Frictional forces heat the infalling material to millions of degrees, producing a bright X-ray source.
When the massive companion star runs out fuel, it will undergo a catastrophic collapse that will produce a supernova explosion, and leave behind a black hole or neutron star. The end result is two compact objects: either a pair of black holes, a pair of neutron stars, or a black hole and neutron star. If the separation between the compact objects becomes small enough as time passes, they will produce gravitational waves. Over time, the size of their orbit will shrink until they merge. LIGO has found three examples of black hole pairs merging in this way in the past two years.
Starburst galaxies like IC 10 are excellent places to search for X-ray binaries because they are churning out stars rapidly. Many of these newly born stars will be pairs of young and massive stars. The most massive of the pair will evolve more quickly and leave behind a black hole or a neutron star partnered with the remaining massive star. If the separation of the stars is small enough, an X-ray binary system will be produced.
This new composite image of IC 10 combines X-ray data from Chandra (blue) with an optical image (red, green, blue) taken by amateur astronomer Bill Snyder from the Heavens Mirror Observatory in Sierra Nevada, California. The X-ray sources detected by Chandra appear as a darker blue than the stars detected in optical light.
The young stars in IC 10 appear to be just the right age to give a maximum amount of interaction between the massive stars and their compact companions, producing the most X-ray sources. If the systems were younger, then the massive stars would not have had time to go supernova and produce a neutron star or black hole, or the orbit of the massive star and the compact object would not have had time to shrink enough for mass transfer to begin. If the star system were much older, then both compact objects would probably have already formed. In this case transfer of matter between the compact objects is unlikely, preventing the formation of an X-ray emitting disk.
Chandra detected 110 X-ray sources in IC 10. Of these, over forty are also seen in optical light and 16 of these contain “blue supergiants”, which are the type of young, massive, hot stars described earlier. Most of the other sources are X-ray binaries containing less massive stars. Several of the objects show strong variability in their X-ray output, indicative of violent interactions between the compact stars and their companions.
A pair of papers describing these results were published in the February 10th, 2017 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. The papers are available online here:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.08611
https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.03803
The authors of the study are Silas Laycock from the UMass Lowell’s Center for Space Science and Technology (UML); Rigel Capallo, a graduate student at UML; Dimitris Christodoulou from UML; Benjamin Williams from the University of Washington in Seattle; Breanna Binder from the California State Polytechnic University in Pomona; and, Andrea Prestwich from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, controls Chandra's science and flight operations.
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/UMass Lowell/S. Laycock et al.; Optical: Bill Snyder
Release Date: August 10, 2017
#NASA #Astronomy #Science #Space #Galaxy #IC10 #Starburst #Cassiopeia #Cosmos #Universe #Gravitational #Waves #Chandra #Xray #Observatory #MSFC #Marshall #STEM #Education
