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Galileo Second Generation satellites take shape
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By European Space Agency
Hisdesat, Spain's premier provider of secure satellite communications, is set to launch its SpainSat Next Generation I (SNG I) satellite aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on 29 January from Cape Canaveral, Florida at 20:34 EST (30 January at 02:34 CET). The European Space Agency (ESA)-supported satellite will provide more cost-effective, adaptable and secure communication services for governments and emergency response teams across Europe, North and South America, Africa, the Middle East and up to Singapore in Asia.
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By NASA
Caption: As part of NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative and Artemis campaign, Intuitive Machines’ second delivery to the Moon will carry NASA technology demonstrations and science investigations on their Nova-C class lunar lander. Credit: Intuitive Machines For the second time, Intuitive Machines will launch a lunar lander to deliver NASA technology demonstrations and science investigations to the Moon for the benefit of all. Media accreditation is open for the IM-2 launch, part of NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative and Artemis campaign to establish a long-term presence on the Moon.
The Intuitive Machines Nova-C class lunar lander will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and carry NASA science, technology demonstrations, and other commercial payloads to Mons Mouton, a lunar plateau near the Moon’s South Pole region. Liftoff is targeted for a multi-day launch window, which opens no earlier than late February, from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Media prelaunch and launch activities will take place at NASA Kennedy and are open to U.S. citizens and international media. U.S. media must apply by Wednesday, Feb. 12, and international media must apply by Wednesday, Feb. 5.
Media wishing to take part in person must apply for credentials at:
https://media.ksc.nasa.gov
Credentialed media will receive a confirmation email upon approval. NASA’s media accreditation policy is available online. For questions about accreditation or to request special logistical support, such as space for satellite trucks, tents, or electrical connections, please email by Wednesday, Feb. 12, to: ksc-media-accreditat@mail.nasa.gov. For other questions, please contact NASA Kennedy’s newsroom at: 321-867-2468.
Para obtener información sobre cobertura en español en el Centro Espacial Kennedy o si desea solicitar entrevistas en español, comuníquese con Antonia Jaramillo o Messod Bendayan a: antonia.jaramillobotero@nasa.gov o messod.c.bendayan@nasa.gov.
Among the items on its lander, the IM-2 mission will deliver one of the first on-site, or in-situ, demonstrations of resource utilization on the Moon, using a drill and mass spectrometer to measure the volatiles content of subsurface materials. Other technology instruments on this delivery will demonstrate a robust surface communications system and deploy a propulsive drone mobility solution.
Launching as a rideshare alongside the IM-2 delivery NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft also will begin its journey to lunar orbit, where it will map the distribution of the different forms of water on the Moon.
A successful landing will help support the CLPS model for commercial payload deliveries to the lunar surface, as another step toward a sustainable lunar future. As a primary customer of CLPS, NASA is investing in lower-cost methods of Moon deliveries and is one of multiple customers for these flights.
NASA is working with several U.S. companies to deliver science and technology to the lunar surface through the agency’s CLPS initiative. This pool of companies may bid on task orders to deliver NASA payloads to the Moon. Contract awards cover end-to-end commercial payload delivery services, including payload integration, mission operations, launch from Earth, and landing on the surface of the Moon. These contracts are indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts with a cumulative maximum value of $2.6 billion through 2028.
For more information about the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, see:
https://www.nasa.gov/clps
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Alise Fisher / Jasmine Hopkins
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
alise.m.fisher@nasa.gov / jasmine.s.hopkins@nasa.gov
Natalia Riusech / Nilufar Ramji
Johnson Space Center, Houston
281-483-5111
natalia.s.riusech@nasa.gov / nilufar.ramji@nasa.gov
Antonia Jaramillo
Kennedy Space Center, Florida
321-867-2468
antonia.jaramillobotero@nasa.gov
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Last Updated Jan 24, 2025 LocationJohnson Space Center Related Terms
Missions Artemis Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) View the full article
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By European Space Agency
Last night a crucial step in the European Space Agency’s eclipse-making Proba-3 mission was completed: the two spacecraft, flying jointly since launch, have successfully separated. This leaves them ready to begin their cosmic dance in the world’s first-ever precision formation-flying mission.
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By NASA
Hubble Space Telescope Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Hubble’s Partners in Science Universe Uncovered Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts News Hubble News Hubble News Archive Social Media Media Resources Multimedia Multimedia Images Videos Sonifications Podcasts e-Books Online Activities Lithographs Fact Sheets Glossary Posters Hubble on the NASA App More 35th Anniversary 4 Min Read Hubble Reveals Surprising Spiral Shape of Galaxy Hosting Young Jet
Quasar J0742+2704 Credits:
NASA, ESA, Kristina Nyland (U.S. Naval Research Laboratory); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI) The night sky has always played a crucial role in navigation, from early ocean crossings to modern GPS. Besides stars, the United States Navy uses quasars as beacons. Quasars are distant galaxies with supermassive black holes, surrounded by brilliantly hot disks of swirling gas that can blast off jets of material. Following up on the groundbreaking 2020 discovery of newborn jets in a number of quasars, aspiring naval officer Olivia Achenbach of the United States Naval Academy has used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to reveal surprising properties of one of them, quasar J0742+2704.
“The biggest surprise was seeing the distinct spiral shape in the Hubble Space Telescope images. At first I was worried I had made an error,” said Achenbach, who made the discovery during the course of a four-week internship.
Quasar J0742+2704 (center) became the subject of astronomers’ interest after it was discovered to have a newborn jet blasting from the disk around its supermassive black hole in 2020, using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) radio observatory. This led to follow-up with other observatories in an effort to determine the properties of the galaxy and what may have triggered the jet. While the jet itself cannot be seen in this Hubble Space Telescope infrared-light image, the spiral shape of J0742+2704 is clear, with faint but detectable arms branching above and below the galaxy center. This was a big surprise to the research team, as quasars hosting jets are typically elliptical-shaped, and its suspected that messy mergers with other galaxies are what funnel gas toward the black hole and fuel jets. These mergers would also disrupt any spiral formation a galaxy may have had before mixing its contents with another galaxy. Though its intact spiral shape means it has not experienced a major merger, Hubble does show evidence that its lower arm has been disrupted, possibly by the tidal forces of interaction with another galaxy. This could mean that jets can be triggered by a far less involved, dramatic interaction of galaxies than a full merger. The large galaxy to the lower right of the quasar appears to be a ring galaxy, another sign of interaction. Some ring galaxies form after a small galaxy passes through the center of a larger galaxy, reconfiguring its gas and dust. The brightest parts of this image — foreground stars and the bright center of the quasar — show the characteristic “starry” spikes produced by Hubble (and other telescopes’) interior structure. They are not actual aspects of the cosmic objects. NASA, ESA, Kristina Nyland (U.S. Naval Research Laboratory); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI) “We typically see quasars as older galaxies that have grown very massive, along with their central black holes, after going through messy mergers and have come out with an elliptical shape,” said astronomer Kristina Nyland of the Naval Research Laboratory, Achenbach’s adviser on the research.
“It’s extremely rare and exciting to find a quasar-hosting galaxy with spiral arms and a black hole that is more than 400 million times the mass of the Sun — which is pretty big — plus young jets that weren’t detectable 20 years ago,” Nyland said.
The unusual quasar takes its place amid an active debate in the astronomy community over what triggers quasar jets, which can be significant in the evolution of galaxies, as the jets can suppress star formation. Some astronomers suspect that quasar jets are triggered by major galaxy mergers, as the material from two or more galaxies mashes together, and heated gas is funneled toward merged black holes. Spiral galaxy quasars like J0742+2704, however, suggest that there may be other pathways for jet formation.
While J0742+2704 has maintained its spiral shape, the Hubble image does show intriguing signs of its potential interaction with other galaxies. One of its arms shows distortion, possibly a tidal tail.
Hubble captured intriguing hints of interaction, if not full merging, between galaxies including quasar J0742+2704. There is evidence of a distorted tidal tail, or a streamer of gas, that has been pulled out by the gravity of a nearby galaxy. The presence of a ring galaxy also suggests interaction: The distinctive shape of ring galaxies are thought to form when one galaxy passes through another, redistributing its contents into a central core circled by stars and gas. Astronomers will be doing further analysis of Hubble’s detailed spectroscopic data, plus follow-up with other telescopes that can see different types of light, to confirm the distances of the galaxies and how they may be affecting one another. NASA, ESA, Kristina Nyland (U.S. Naval Research Laboratory); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI) “Clearly there is something interesting going on. While the quasar has not experienced a major disruptive merger, it may be interacting with another galaxy, which is gravitationally tugging at its spiral arm,” said Nyland.
Another galaxy that appears nearby in the Hubble image (though its location still needs to be spectroscopically confirmed) has a ring structure. This rare shape can occur after a galaxy interaction in which a smaller galaxy punches through the center of a spiral galaxy. “The ring galaxy near the quasar host galaxy could be an intriguing clue as to what is happening in this system. We may be witnessing the aftermath of the interaction that triggered this young quasar jet,” said Nyland.
Both Achenbach and Nyland emphasize that this intriguing discovery is really a new starting point, and there will be additional multi-wavelength analysis of J0742+2704 with data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. It’s also a case for keeping our eyes on the skies, said Achenbach.
“If we looked at this galaxy 20 years, or maybe even a decade ago, we would have seen a fairly average quasar and never known it would eventually be home to newborn jets,” said Achenbach. “It goes to show that if you keep searching, you can find something remarkable that you never expected, and it can send you in a whole new direction of discovery.”
The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for over three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.
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Claire Andreoli (claire.andreoli@nasa.gov)
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Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD
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Last Updated Jan 13, 2025 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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Hubble Space Telescope
Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.
Hubble Science Highlights
Hubble’s Night Sky Challenge
Universe Uncovered
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By NASA
On Jan. 7, 1610, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei peered through his newly improved 20-power homemade telescope at the planet Jupiter. He noticed three other points of light near the planet, at first believing them to be distant stars. Observing them over several nights, he noted that they appeared to move in the wrong direction with regard to the background stars and they remained in Jupiter’s proximity but changed their positions relative to one another. Four days later, he observed a fourth point of light near the planet with the same unusual behavior. By Jan. 15, Galileo correctly concluded that he had discovered four moons orbiting around Jupiter, providing strong evidence for the Copernican theory that most celestial objects did not revolve around the Earth.
Two of Galileo’s telescopes.National Geographic. Painting by Giuseppe Bertini (1858) of Galileo demonstrating his telescope to the Doge of Venice.gabrielevanin.it Page from Galileo’s notebook about his observations of Jupiter’s satellites.University of Michigan Special Collections Library. In March 1610, Galileo published his discoveries of Jupiter’s satellites and other celestial observations in a book titled Siderius Nuncius (The Starry Messenger). As their discoverer, Galileo had naming rights to Jupiter’s satellites. He proposed to name them after his patrons the Medicis and astronomers called them the Medicean Stars through much of the seventeenth century, although in his own notes Galileo referred to them by the Roman numerals I, II, III, and IV, in order of their distance from Jupiter. Astronomers still refer to the four moons as the Galilean satellites in honor of their discoverer.
In 1614, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler suggested naming the satellites after mythological figures associated with Jupiter, namely Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, but his idea didn’t catch on for more than 200 years. Scientists didn’t discover any more satellites around Jupiter until 1892 when American astronomer E.E. Barnard found Jupiter’s fifth moon Amalthea, much smaller than the Galilean moons and orbiting closer to the planet than Io. It was the last satellite in the solar system found by visual observation – all subsequent discoveries occurred via photography or digital imaging. As of today, astronomers have identified 95 moons orbiting Jupiter.
Image of Jupiter and three of its four Galilean satellites through an amateur telescope, similar to what Galileo might have seen. Hubble Space Telescope image of Jupiter and three of its four Galilean satellites during a rare triple transit. Although each of the Galilean satellites has unique features, such as the volcanoes of Io, the heavily cratered surface of Callisto, and the magnetic field of Ganymede, scientists have focused more attention on Europa due to the tantalizing possibility that it might be hospitable to life. In the 1970s, NASA’s Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft took ever increasingly detailed images of the large satellites including Europa during their flybys of Jupiter. The photographs revealed Europa to have the smoothest surface of any object in the solar system, indicating a relatively young crust, and also one of the brightest of any satellite indicating a highly reflective surface. These features led scientists to hypothesize that Europa is covered by an icy crust floating on a subsurface salty ocean. They further postulated that tidal heating caused by Jupiter’s gravity reforms the surface ice layer in cycles of melting and freezing.
Image of Europa taken by Pioneer 10 during its flyby of Jupiter in 1973. Image of Europa taken by Voyager 1 during its 1979 flyby of Jupiter. Image of Europa taken by Voyager 2 during its 1979 flyby of Jupiter. More detailed observations from NASA’s Galileo spacecraft that orbited Jupiter between 1995 and 2003 and completed 11 close encounters with Europa revealed that long linear features on its surface may indicate tidal or tectonic activity. Reddish-brown material along the fissures and in splotches elsewhere on the surface may contain salts and sulfur compounds transported from below the crust and modified by radiation. Observations from the Hubble Space Telescope and re-analysis of images from Galileo revealed possible plumes emanating from beneath Europa’s crust, lending credence to that hypothesis. While the exact composition of this material is not known, it likely holds clues to whether Europa may be hospitable to life.
Global view of Europa from the Galileo spacecraft. More detailed views of varied terrain on Europa from Galileo. Cutaway illustration of Europa’s icy crust, subsurface ocean and possible vents that transport material to the surface. Future robotic explorers of Europa may answer some of the outstanding questions about this unique satellite of Jupiter. NASA’s Europa Clipper set off in October 2024 on a 5.5-year journey to Jupiter. After its arrival in 2030, the spacecraft will enter orbit around the giant planet and conduct 49 flybys of Europa during its four-year mission. Managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, Europa Clipper will carry nine instruments including imaging systems and a radar to better understand the structure of the icy crust. Data from Europa Clipper will complement information returned by the European Space Agency’s JUICE (Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer) spacecraft. Launched in April 2023, JUICE will first enter orbit around Jupiter in 2031 and then enter orbit around Ganymede in 2034. The spacecraft also plans to conduct studies of Europa complementary with Europa Clipper’s. The two spacecraft should greatly increase our understanding of Europa and perhaps uncover new mysteries.
Illustration of the Europa Clipper spacecraft investigating Europa. Illustration of the JUICE spacecraft exploring Europa.European Space Agency. View the full article
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