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By NASA
4 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
A crane lowers the steel reflector framework for Deep Space Station 23 into position Dec. 18 on a 65-foot-high (20-meter) platform above the antenna’s pedestal that will steer the reflector. Panels will be affixed to the structure create a curved surface to collect radio frequency signals.NASA/JPL-Caltech After the steel framework of the Deep Space Station 23 reflector dish was lowered into place on Dec. 18, a crew installed the quadripod, a four-legged support structure that will direct radio frequency signals from deep space that bounce off the main reflector into the antenna’s receiver.NASA/JPL-Caltech Deep Space Station 23’s 133-ton reflector dish was recently installed, marking a key step in strengthening NASA’s Deep Space Network.
NASA’s Deep Space Network, an array of giant radio antennas, allows agency missions to track, send commands to, and receive scientific data from spacecraft venturing to the Moon and beyond. NASA is adding a new antenna, bringing the total to 15, to support increased demand for the world’s largest and most sensitive radio frequency telecommunication system.
Installation of the latest antenna took place on Dec. 18, when teams at NASA’s Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex near Barstow, California, installed the metal reflector framework for Deep Space Station 23, a multifrequency beam-waveguide antenna. When operational in 2026, Deep Space Station 23 will receive transmissions from missions such as Perseverance, Psyche, Europa Clipper, Voyager 1, and a growing fleet of future human and robotic spacecraft in deep space.
“This addition to the Deep Space Network represents a crucial communication upgrade for the agency,” said Kevin Coggins, deputy associate administrator of NASA’s SCaN (Space Communications and Navigation) program. “The communications infrastructure has been in continuous operation since its creation in 1963, and with this upgrade we are ensuring NASA is ready to support the growing number of missions exploring the Moon, Mars, and beyond.”
This time-lapse video shows the entire day of construction activities for the Deep Space Station 23 antenna at the NASA Deep Space Network’s Goldstone Space Communications Complex near Barstow, California, on Dec. 18. NASA/JPL-Caltech Construction of the new antenna has been under way for more than four years, and during the installation, teams used a crawler crane to lower the 133-ton metal skeleton of the 112-foot-wide (34-meter-wide) parabolic reflector before it was bolted to a 65-foot-high (20-meter-high) alidade, a platform above the antenna’s pedestal that will steer the reflector during operations.
“One of the biggest challenges facing us during the lift was to ensure that 40 bolt-holes were perfectly aligned between the structure and alidade,” said Germaine Aziz, systems engineer, Deep Space Network Aperture Enhancement Program of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “This required a meticulous emphasis on alignment prior to the lift to guarantee everything went smoothly on the day.”
Following the main lift, engineers carried out a lighter lift to place a quadripod, a four-legged support structure weighing 16 1/2 tons, onto the center of the upward-facing reflector. The quadripod features a curved subreflector that will direct radio frequency signals from deep space that bounce off the main reflector into the antenna’s pedestal, where the antenna’s receivers are housed.
In the early morning of Dec. 18, a crane looms over the 112-foot-wide (34-meter-wide) steel framework for Deep Space Station 23 reflector dish, which will soon be lowered into position on the antenna’s base structure.NASA/JPL-Caltech Engineers will now work to fit panels onto the steel skeleton to create a curved surface to reflect radio frequency signals. Once complete, Deep Space Station 23 will be the fifth of six new beam-waveguide antennas to join the network, following Deep Space Station 53, which was added at the Deep Space Network’s Madrid complex in 2022.
“With the Deep Space Network, we are able to explore the Martian landscape with our rovers, see the James Webb Space Telescope’s stunning cosmic observations, and so much more,” said Laurie Leshin, director of JPL. “The network enables over 40 deep space missions, including the farthest human-made objects in the universe, Voyager 1 and 2. With upgrades like these, the network will continue to support humanity’s exploration of our solar system and beyond, enabling groundbreaking science and discovery far into the future.”
NASA’s Deep Space Network is managed by JPL, with the oversight of NASA’s SCaN Program. More than 100 NASA and non-NASA missions rely on the Deep Space Network and Near Space Network, including supporting astronauts aboard the International Space Station and future Artemis missions, monitoring Earth’s weather and the effects of climate change, supporting lunar exploration, and uncovering the solar system and beyond.
For more information about the Deep Space Network, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/communicating-with-missions/dsn
News Media Contact
Ian J. O’Neill
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-2649
ian.j.oneill@jpl.nasa.gov
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Last Updated Dec 20, 2024 Related Terms
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By European Space Agency
Our understanding of planet formation in the Universe’s early days is challenged by new data from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Webb solved a puzzle by proving a controversial finding made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope more than 20 years ago.
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By NASA
Webb Webb News Latest News Latest Images Blog (offsite) Awards X (offsite – login reqd) Instagram (offsite – login reqd) Facebook (offsite- login reqd) Youtube (offsite) Overview About Who is James Webb? Fact Sheet Impacts+Benefits FAQ Science Overview and Goals Early Universe Galaxies Over Time Star Lifecycle Other Worlds Observatory Overview Launch Orbit Mirrors Sunshield Instrument: NIRCam Instrument: MIRI Instrument: NIRSpec Instrument: FGS/NIRISS Optical Telescope Element Backplane Spacecraft Bus Instrument Module Multimedia About Webb Images Images Videos What is Webb Observing? 3d Webb in 3d Solar System Podcasts Webb Image Sonifications Team International Team People Of Webb More For the Media For Scientists For Educators For Fun/Learning 7 Min Read NASA’s Webb Finds Planet-Forming Disks Lived Longer in Early Universe
This is a James Webb Space Telescope image of NGC 346, a massive star cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that is one of the Milky Way’s nearest neighbors. Credits:
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Olivia C. Jones (UK ATC), Guido De Marchi (ESTEC), Margaret Meixner (USRA) NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope just solved a conundrum by proving a controversial finding made with the agency’s Hubble Space Telescope more than 20 years ago.
In 2003, Hubble provided evidence of a massive planet around a very old star, almost as old as the universe. Such stars possess only small amounts of heavier elements that are the building blocks of planets. This implied that some planet formation happened when our universe was very young, and those planets had time to form and grow big inside their primordial disks, even bigger than Jupiter. But how? This was puzzling.
To answer this question, researchers used Webb to study stars in a nearby galaxy that, much like the early universe, lacks large amounts of heavy elements. They found that not only do some stars there have planet-forming disks, but that those disks are longer-lived than those seen around young stars in our Milky Way galaxy.
“With Webb, we have a really strong confirmation of what we saw with Hubble, and we must rethink how we model planet formation and early evolution in the young universe,” said study leader Guido De Marchi of the European Space Research and Technology Centre in Noordwijk, Netherlands.
Image A: Protoplanetary Disks in NGC 346 (NIRCam Image)
This is a James Webb Space Telescope image of NGC 346, a massive star cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that is one of the Milky Way’s nearest neighbors. With its relative lack of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, the NGC 346 cluster serves as a nearby proxy for studying stellar environments with similar conditions in the early, distant universe. Ten, small, yellow circles overlaid on the image indicate the positions of the ten stars surveyed in this study. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Olivia C. Jones (UK ATC), Guido De Marchi (ESTEC), Margaret Meixner (USRA) A Different Environment in Early Times
In the early universe, stars formed from mostly hydrogen and helium, and very few heavier elements such as carbon and iron, which came later through supernova explosions.
“Current models predict that with so few heavier elements, the disks around stars have a short lifetime, so short in fact that planets cannot grow big,” said the Webb study’s co-investigator Elena Sabbi, chief scientist for Gemini Observatory at the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab in Tucson. “But Hubble did see those planets, so what if the models were not correct and disks could live longer?”
To test this idea, scientists trained Webb on the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that is one of the Milky Way’s nearest neighbors. In particular, they examined the massive, star-forming cluster NGC 346, which also has a relative lack of heavier elements. The cluster served as a nearby proxy for studying stellar environments with similar conditions in the early, distant universe.
Hubble observations of NGC 346 from the mid 2000s revealed many stars about 20 to 30 million years old that seemed to still have planet-forming disks around them. This went against the conventional belief that such disks would dissipate after 2 or 3 million years.
“The Hubble findings were controversial, going against not only empirical evidence in our galaxy but also against the current models,” said De Marchi. “This was intriguing, but without a way to obtain spectra of those stars, we could not really establish whether we were witnessing genuine accretion and the presence of disks, or just some artificial effects.”
Now, thanks to Webb’s sensitivity and resolution, scientists have the first-ever spectra of forming, Sun-like stars and their immediate environments in a nearby galaxy.
“We see that these stars are indeed surrounded by disks and are still in the process of gobbling material, even at the relatively old age of 20 or 30 million years,” said De Marchi. “This also implies that planets have more time to form and grow around these stars than in nearby star-forming regions in our own galaxy.”
Image B: Protoplanetary Disks in NGC 346 Spectra (NIRSpec)
This graph shows, on the bottom left in yellow, a spectrum of one of the 10 target stars in this study (as well as accompanying light from the immediate background environment). Spectral fingerprints of hot atomic helium, cold molecular hydrogen, and hot atomic hydrogen are highlighted. On the top left in magenta is a spectrum slightly offset from the star that includes only light from the background environment. This second spectrum lacks a spectral line of cold molecular hydrogen.
On the right is the comparison of the top and bottom lines. This comparison shows a large peak in the cold molecular hydrogen coming from the star but not its nebular environment. Also, atomic hydrogen shows a larger peak from the star. This indicates the presence of a protoplanetary disk immediately surrounding the star. The data was taken with the microshutter array on the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrometer) instrument. Illustration: NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI) A New Way of Thinking
This finding refutes previous theoretical predictions that when there are very few heavier elements in the gas around the disk, the star would very quickly blow away the disk. So the disk’s life would be very short, even less than a million years. But if a disk doesn’t stay around the star long enough for the dust grains to stick together and pebbles to form and become the core of a planet, how can planets form?
The researchers explained that there could be two distinct mechanisms, or even a combination, for planet-forming disks to persist in environments scarce in heavier elements.
First, to be able to blow away the disk, the star applies radiation pressure. For this pressure to be effective, elements heavier than hydrogen and helium would have to reside in the gas. But the massive star cluster NGC 346 only has about ten percent of the heavier elements that are present in the chemical composition of our Sun. Perhaps it simply takes longer for a star in this cluster to disperse its disk.
The second possibility is that, for a Sun-like star to form when there are few heavier elements, it would have to start from a larger cloud of gas. A bigger gas cloud will produce a bigger disk. So there is more mass in the disk and therefore it would take longer to blow the disk away, even if the radiation pressure were working in the same way.
“With more matter around the stars, the accretion lasts for a longer time,” said Sabbi. “The disks take ten times longer to disappear. This has implications for how you form a planet, and the type of system architecture that you can have in these different environments. This is so exciting.”
The science team’s paper appears in the Dec. 16 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.
Image C: NGC 346: Hubble and Webb Observations
Image Before/After The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
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 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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Media Contacts
Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Ann Jenkins – jenkins@stsci.edu, Christine Pulliam – cpulliam@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
Related Information
Past releases on NGC 346: Webb NIRCam image and MIRI image
Article: Highlighting other Webb Star Formation Discoveries
Simulation Video: Planetary Systems and Origins of Life
Animation Video: Exploring star and planet formation (English), and in Spanish
More Images of NGC 346 on AstroPix
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By NASA
Artist’s concept depicts new research that has expanded our understanding of exoplanet WASP-69 b’s “tail.” NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC) The Planet
WASP-69 b
The Discovery
The exoplanet WASP-69 b has a “tail,” leaving a trail of gas in its wake.
Key Takeaway
WASP-69 b is slowly losing its atmosphere as light hydrogen and helium particles in the planet’s outer atmosphere escape the planet over time. But those gas particles don’t escape evenly around the planet, instead they are swept into a tail of gas by the stellar wind coming from the planet’s star.
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Hot Jupiters like WASP-69 b are super-hot gas giants orbiting their host stars closely. When radiation coming from a star heats up a planet’s outer atmosphere, the planet can experience photoevaporation, a process in which lightweight gases like hydrogen and helium are heated by this radiation and launched outward into space. Essentially, WASP-69 b’s star strips gas from the planet’s outer atmosphere over time.
What’s more, something called the stellar wind can shape this escaping gas into an exoplanetary tail.
The stellar wind is a continuous stream of charged particles that flow outwards into space from a star’s outer atmosphere, or corona. On Earth, the Sun’s stellar wind interacts with our planet’s magnetic field which can create beautiful auroras like the Northern Lights.
On WASP-69 b, the stellar wind coming from its host star actually shapes the gas escaping from the planet’s outer atmosphere. So, instead of gas just escaping evenly around the planet, “strong stellar winds can sculpt that outflow in tails that trail behind the planet,” said lead author Dakotah Tyler, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Los Angeles, likening this gaseous tail to a comet’s tail.
Because this tail is created by the stellar wind, however, that means it’s subject to change.
“If the stellar wind were to taper down, then you could imagine that the planet is still losing some of its atmosphere, but it just isn’t getting shaped into the tail,” Tyler said, adding that, without the stellar wind, that gas escaping on all sides of the planet would be spherical and symmetrical. “But if you crank up the stellar wind, that atmosphere then gets sculpted into a tail.”
Tyler likened the process to a windsock blowing in the breeze, with the sock forming a more structured shape when the wind picks up and it fills with air.
The tail that Tyler and his research team observed on WASP-69 b extended more than 7.5 times the radius of the planet, or over 350,000 miles. But it’s possible that the tail is even longer. The team had to end observations with the telescope before the tail’s signal disappeared, so this measurement is a lower limit on the tail’s true length at the time.
However, keep in mind that because the tail is influenced by the stellar wind, changes in the stellar wind could change the tail’s size and shape over time. Additionally changes in the stellar wind influence the tail’s size and shape, but since the tail is visible when illuminated by starlight, changes in stellar activity can also affect tail observations.
Exoplanet tails are still a bit mysterious, especially because they are subject to change. The study of exoplanet tails could help scientists to better understand how these tails form as well as the ever-changing relationship between the stellar and planetary atmospheres. Additionally, because these exoplanetary tails are shaped by stellar activity, they could serve as indicators of stellar behavior over time. This could be helpful for scientists as they seek to learn more about the stellar winds of stars other than the star we know the most about, our very own Sun.
Fun Facts
WASP-69 b is losing a lot of gas — about 200,000 tons per second. But it’s losing this gaseous atmosphere very slowly — so slowly in fact that there is no danger of the planet being totally stripped or disappearing. In general, every billion years, the planet is losing an amount of material that equals the mass of planet Earth.
The solar system that WASP-69 b inhabits is about 7 billion years old, so even though the rate of atmosphere loss will vary over time, you might estimate that this planet has lost the equivalent of seven Earths (in mass) of gas over that period.
The Discoverers
A team of scientists led by Dakotah Tyler of the University of California, Los Angeles published a paper in January, 2024 on their discovery, “WASP-69b’s Escaping Envelope Is Confined to a Tail Extending at Least 7 Rp,” in the journal, “The Astrophysical Journal.” The observations described in this paper were made by Keck/NIRSPEC (NIRSPEC is a spectrograph designed for Keck II).
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By NASA
NASA/Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey and VIIRS day-night band data from the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership Lava encroaches on the Blue Lagoon, a popular tourist destination in Iceland, in this Nov. 24, 2024, Landsat 9 image overlaid with an infrared signal. The infrared signal helps distinguish the lava’s heat signature.
A volcanic fissure burst open on Iceland’s Reykjanes peninsula four days prior, heralded by a series of earthquakes. A plume of gas, consisting primarily of sulfur dioxide, streamed from the lava. The Reykjanes peninsula eruption is the seventh in a series of events that began in December 2023.
Image credit: NASA/Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey and VIIRS day-night band data from the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership
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