Members Can Post Anonymously On This Site
NASA’s Lucy Surprises Again, Observes 1st-ever Contact Binary Orbiting Asteroid
-
Similar Topics
-
By European Space Agency
Hera asteroid mission launch kit
Everything you'd ever want to know about ESA's first planetary defence mission
View the full article
-
By NASA
Eclipsing binary stars point the way to exoplanets and many other discoveries. Be one of the first to join the new Eclipsing Binary Patrol project and help discover them! NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Eclipsing binaries are special pairs of stars that cross in front of one another as they orbit—stars that take turns blocking one another from our view. At Eclipsing Binary Patrol, the newest NASA-funded citizen science project, you’ll have a chance to help discover these unusual pairs of objects.
In Eclipsing Binary Patrol, you’ll work with real data from NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) mission. TESS collects a lot of information! But computers sometimes struggle to tell when the data show us something unimportant, like background noise or objects that aren’t stars. With your help, we can identify the correct targets and gain deeper insights into the behavior of double star systems.
“I’ve never worked as a professional astronomer, but being part of the Eclipsing Binary Patrol allows me to work with real data and contribute to actual discoveries,” said Aline Fornear, a volunteer from Brazil. “It’s exciting beyond words to know that my efforts are helping with the understanding of star systems so far away, and potentially new worlds, too!”
As a volunteer at Eclipsing Binary Patrol, your work will help confirm when a particular target is indeed an eclipsing binary, verify its orbital period, and ensure the target is the true source of the detected eclipses. You’ll be essential in distinguishing genuine discoveries from false signals. To get involved, visit our page on the Zooniverse platform and start sciencing!
Facebook logo @DoNASAScience @DoNASAScience Share
Details
Last Updated Sep 05, 2024 Related Terms
Astrophysics Citizen Science Explore More
6 min read NASA’s Hubble, MAVEN Help Solve the Mystery of Mars’ Escaping Water
Article
1 hour ago
5 min read NASA’s Webb Reveals Distorted Galaxy Forming Cosmic Question Mark
Article
1 day ago
3 min read NASA’s Mini BurstCube Mission Detects Mega Blast
Article
2 days ago
View the full article
-
By NASA
2 min read
Hubble Observes An Oddly Organized Satellite
NASA, ESA, and E. Skillman (University of Minnesota – Twin Cities; Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America) Andromeda III is one of at least 13 dwarf satellite galaxies in orbit around the Andromeda galaxy, or Messier 31, the Milky Way’s closest grand spiral galactic neighbor. Andromeda III is a faint, spheroidal collection of old, reddish stars that appears devoid of new star formation and younger stars. In fact, Andromeda III seems to be only about 3 billion years younger than the majority of globular clusters ― dense knots of stars thought to have been mostly born at the same time, which contain some of the oldest stars known in the universe.
Astronomers suspect that dwarf spheroidal galaxies may be leftovers of the kind of cosmic objects that were shredded and melded by gravitational interactions to build the halos of large galaxies. Curiously, studies have found that several of the Andromeda Galaxy’s dwarf galaxies, including Andromeda III, orbit in a flat plane around the galaxy, like the planets in our solar system orbit around the Sun. The alignment is puzzling because models of galaxy formation don’t show dwarf galaxies falling into such orderly formations, but rather moving around the galaxy randomly in all directions. As they slowly lose energy, the dwarf galaxies merge into the larger galaxy.
The odd alignment could be because many of Andromeda’s dwarf galaxies fell into orbit around it as a single group, or because the dwarf galaxies are scraps left over from the merger of two larger galaxies. Either of these theories, which are being researched via NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, would complicate theories of galaxy formation but also help guide and refine future models.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope took this image of Andromeda III as part of an investigation into the star formation and chemical enrichment histories of a sample of M31 dwarf spheroidal galaxies that compared their first episodes of star formation to those of Milky Way satellite galaxies.
Download Image
Explore More
Hubble’s Galaxies
Facebook logo @NASAHubble @NASAHubble Instagram logo @NASAHubble Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
Share
Details
Last Updated Aug 29, 2024 Editor Michelle Belleville Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
Astrophysics Galaxies Goddard Space Flight Center Hubble Space Telescope Stars Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA
Hubble Space Telescope
Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.
Hubble Science
Hubble’s Galaxies
Stars
View the full article
-
By NASA
Curiosity Navigation Curiosity Home Mission Overview Where is Curiosity? Mission Updates Science Overview Instruments Highlights Exploration Goals News and Features Multimedia Curiosity Raw Images Images Videos Audio More Resources Mars Missions Mars Sample Return Mars Perseverance Rover Mars Curiosity Rover MAVEN Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Odyssey More Mars Missions The Solar System The Sun Mercury Venus Earth The Moon Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto & Dwarf Planets Asteroids, Comets & Meteors The Kuiper Belt The Oort Cloud 4 min read
Sols 4289-4290: From Discovery Pinnacle to Kings Canyon and Back Again
This image shows the workspace in front of NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity, taken by the Left Navigation Camera aboard the rover on sol 4287 — Martian day 4,287 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — on Aug. 28, 2024, at 02:23:27 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech Earth planning date: Wednesday, Aug. 28 2024
We are back … almost, anyways. Today’s parking location is very close to where we parked on sol 4253, and in an area near one of the previous contact science targets “Discovery Pinnacle.” You can read in this blog post that most of the team, this blogger included, was in Pasadena for our team meeting when we were last in this area. That was July and Curiosity was about to turn 12 on Mars. Coming back is a very rare occasion and is always planned carefully. Once or twice during the last 12 years it happened because we saw something “in the rear mirror.” One of the examples is the target “Old Soaker,” where we spotted mud cracks in the images from a previous parking position, and promptly went back because this was such an important discovery. At other times it was carefully planned, such as the “walkabout” at “Pink Cliffs,” which you can watch in this video from as long back as Earth year 2015. In the past few planning cycles, it’s more of the latter as we made our way from Discovery Pinnacle, where we were on sol 4253, “Just passing through” “Russell Pass” and arriving at “Kings Canyon,” our drill location, which we reached on sol 4257. You can follow all the action of the drilling at Kings Canyon on the blogs. It took a while — it always does — because it’s an activity with many steps and investigations to complete. We actually celebrated Curiosity’s 12th birthday at Kings Canyon! We departed on sol 4283, came back via “Cathedral Peak,” and are now near the Discovery Pinnacle location again. After that little walkabout through the history of (some) of Curiosity’s walkabouts, especially the very last one, let’s look at today’s plan.
It is a pretty normal two-sol plan, with a one-hour science block before we drive away from this location. We were greeted by a nicely flat surface, and the engineers informed us that we have all six wheels firmly on flat and stable ground. That’s always a relief, because only then can we use the arm. That nice piece of flat rock Curiosity is so firmly parked on became our science target …well, mostly. Some of the little pebbles on the surface attracted our attention, too. The very eagle-eyed can spot a small white spot in the image above. It’s right between the arm and the rover itself, about where the C is written. That’s a rock that we likely broke up with our wheel and that has a very white part to it. We called it “Thousand Island Lake,” and will image it with MAHLI. APXS is investigating a target called “Eichorn Pinnacle,” squarely on the big flat area. LIBS is also making the most of the large target underneath and in front of us, investigating the target “Nine Lakes Basin.”
In recent blogs you will have read about the dust-storm watch making the atmospheric investigations even more important, so we don’t miss any changes. We are looking for dust devils, atmospheric opacity, and are of course monitoring the weather throughout the plan.
Our drive will hopefully — if Mars agrees — be a long one, and we will also plan an activity that we call MARDI sidewalk. That’s when we take very frequent pictures with the MARDI instrument while driving. This results in a long strip of images nicely showing the nature of the terrain the rover has driven over. This is in addition to the MARDI single frame we are taking every time the rover stops. I often get the question, why are we taking an image just downwards whenever the rover stops? Well, humans are easy to bias toward the outliers, toward the things that look special, and of course the Curiosity team is no exception. For some things this is great, because it allows for the discoveries of new things. But it doesn’t provide an unbiased overview. That’s what MARDI does: It always points down and reliably records the terrain under the rover. We don’t have to do anything but put the commands for that one image into our plan after the drive — something that’s pretty routine after 12 years now!
Written by Susanne Schwenzer, Planetary Geologist at The Open University
Share
Details
Last Updated Aug 29, 2024 Related Terms
Blogs Explore More
3 min read Sols 4287-4288: Back on the Road
Article
1 day ago
3 min read Perseverance Kicks off the Crater Rim Campaign!
Perseverance is officially headed into a new phase of scientific investigation on the Jezero Crater…
Article
2 days ago
4 min read Sols 4284–4286: Environmental Science Extravaganza
Article
3 days ago
Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA
Mars
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun, and the seventh largest. It’s the only planet we know of inhabited…
All Mars Resources
Explore this collection of Mars images, videos, resources, PDFs, and toolkits. Discover valuable content designed to inform, educate, and inspire,…
Rover Basics
Each robotic explorer sent to the Red Planet has its own unique capabilities driven by science. Many attributes of a…
Mars Exploration: Science Goals
The key to understanding the past, present or future potential for life on Mars can be found in NASA’s four…
View the full article
-
By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
A mirror that was later installed inside the telescope for NASA’s Near-Earth Object Surveyor shows a reflection of principal optical engineer Brian Monacelli during an inspection of the mirror’s surface at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on July 17.NASA/JPL-Caltech A technician operates articulating equipment to rotate NEO Surveyor’s aluminum optical bench — part of the spacecraft’s telescope — in a clean room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California on July 17.NASA/JPL-Caltech The mirrors for NASA’s Near-Earth Object Surveyor space telescope are being installed and aligned, and work on other spacecraft components is accelerating.
NASA’s new asteroid-hunting spacecraft is taking shape at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Called NEO Surveyor (Near-Earth Object Surveyor), this cutting-edge infrared space telescope will seek out the hardest-to-find asteroids and comets that might pose a hazard to our planet. In fact, it is the agency’s first space telescope designed specifically for planetary defense.
Targeting launch in late 2027, the spacecraft will travel a million miles to a region of gravitational stability — called the L1 Lagrange point — between Earth and the Sun. From there, its large sunshade will block the glare and heat of sunlight, allowing the mission to discover and track near-Earth objects as they approach Earth from the direction of the Sun, which is difficult for other observatories to do. The space telescope also may reveal asteroids called Earth Trojans, which lead and trail our planet’s orbit and are difficult to see from the ground or from Earth orbit.
NEO Surveyor relies on cutting-edge detectors that observe two bands of infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye. Near-Earth objects, no matter how dark, glow brightly in infrared as the Sun heats them. Because of this, the telescope will be able to find dark asteroids and comets, which don’t reflect much visible light. It also will measure those objects, a challenging task for visible-light telescopes that have a hard time distinguishing between small, highly reflective objects and large, dark ones.
This artist’s concept depicts NASA’s NEO Surveyor in deep space. The black-paneled angular structure in the belly of the spacecraft is the instrument enclosure that is being built at JPL. The mission’s infrared telescope will be installed inside the enclosure.NASA/JPL-Caltech “NEO Surveyor is optimized to help us to do one specific thing: enable humanity to find the most hazardous asteroids and comets far enough in advance so we can do something about them,” said Amy Mainzer, principal investigator for NEO Surveyor and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We aim to build a spacecraft that can find, track, and characterize the objects with the greatest chance of hitting Earth. In the process, we will learn a lot about their origins and evolution.”
Coming Into Focus
The spacecraft’s only instrument is its telescope. About the size of a washer-and-dryer set, the telescope’s blocky aluminum body, called the optical bench, was built in a JPL clean room. Known as a three-mirror anastigmat telescope, it will rely on curved mirrors to focus light onto its infrared detectors in such a way that minimizes optical aberrations.
“We have been carefully managing the fabrication of the spacecraft’s telescope mirrors, all of which were received in the JPL clean room by July,” said Brian Monacelli, principal optical engineer at JPL. “Its mirrors were shaped and polished from solid aluminum using a diamond-turning machine. Each exceeds the mission’s performance requirements.”
Monacelli inspected the mirror surfaces for debris and damage, then JPL’s team of optomechanical technicians and engineers attached the mirrors to the telescope’s optical bench in August. Next, they will measure the telescope’s performance and align its mirrors.
Complementing the mirror assembly are the telescope’s mercury-cadmium-telluride detectors, which are similar to the detectors used by NASA’s recently retired NEOWISE (short for Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission. An advantage of these detectors is that they don’t necessarily require cryogenic coolers or cryogens to lower their operational temperatures in order to detect infrared wavelengths. Cryocoolers and cryogens can limit the lifespan of a spacecraft. NEO Surveyor will instead keep its cool by using its large sunshade to block sunlight from heating the telescope and by occupying an orbit beyond that of the Moon, minimizing heating from Earth.
The telescope will eventually be installed inside the spacecraft’s instrument enclosure, which is being assembled in JPL’s historic High Bay 1 clean room where NASA missions such as Voyager, Cassini, and Perseverance were constructed. Fabricated from dark composite material that allows heat to escape, the enclosure will help keep the telescope cool and prevent its own heat from obscuring observations.
Once it is completed in coming weeks, the enclosure will be tested to make sure it can withstand the rigors of space exploration. Then it will be mounted on the back of the sunshade and atop the electronic systems that will power and control the spacecraft.
“The entire team has been working hard for a long time to get to this point, and we are excited to see the hardware coming together with contributions from our institutional and industrial collaborators from across the country,” said Tom Hoffman, NEO Surveyor’s project manager at JPL. “From the panels and cables for the instrument enclosure to the detectors and mirrors for the telescope — as well as components to build the spacecraft — hardware is being fabricated, delivered, and assembled to build this incredible observatory.”
Assembly of NEO Surveyor can be viewed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, via JPL’s live cam.
More About NEO Surveyor
The NEO Surveyor mission marks a major step for NASA toward reaching its U.S. Congress-mandated goal to discover and characterize at least 90% of the near-Earth objects more than 460 feet (140 meters) across that come within 30 million miles (48 million kilometers) of our planet’s orbit. Objects of this size can cause significant regional damage, or worse, should they impact the Earth.
The mission is tasked by NASA’s Planetary Science Division within the Science Mission Directorate; program oversight is provided by the Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which was established in 2016 to manage the agency’s ongoing efforts in planetary defense. NASA’s Planetary Missions Program Office at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center provides program management for NEO Surveyor.
The project is being developed by JPL and is led by principal investigator Amy Mainzer at UCLA. Established aerospace and engineering companies have been contracted to build the spacecraft and its instrumentation, including BAE Systems, Space Dynamics Laboratory, and Teledyne. The Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder will support operations, and IPAC-Caltech in Pasadena, California, is responsible for processing survey data and producing the mission’s data products. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
More information about NEO Surveyor is available at:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/neo-surveyor
News Media Contacts
Ian J. O’Neill
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-2649
ian.j.oneill@jpl.nasa.gov
Karen Fox / Alana Johnson
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600 / 202-358-1501
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov
2024-114
Share
Details
Last Updated Aug 28, 2024 Related Terms
NEO Surveyor (Near-Earth Object Surveyor Space Telescope) Comets Jet Propulsion Laboratory Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) Planetary Defense Planetary Defense Coordination Office Explore More
5 min read NASA’s Europa Clipper Gets Set of Super-Size Solar Arrays
Article 23 hours ago 2 min read NASA’s DART Team Earns AIAA Space Systems Award for Pioneering Mission
NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission continues to yield scientific discoveries and garner accolades for its groundbreaking…
Article 7 days ago 5 min read Danish Instrument Helps NASA’s Juno Spacecraft See Radiation
Article 1 week ago Keep Exploring Discover Related Topics
Missions
Humans in Space
Climate Change
Solar System
View the full article
-
-
Check out these Videos
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.