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By NASA
NASA canvases the areas impacted by Hurricane Milton using cloud-penetrating L-band radar providing responders insight into flooding across Florida.NASA In the wake of Hurricane Milton, NASA is deploying resources to support Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and state emergency management agencies to aid their response effort including satellite and aerial data collection.
The agency’s Disasters Response Coordination System and Airborne Science Program are began conducting flights Friday to provide emergency responders with better insight into flooding, damage in Florida, and debris.
“After the devastating impact from hurricanes Helene and Milton, NASA immediately sprang into action,” said Karen St. Germain, director, Earth Sciences Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Whether it is through observations from space or from airplanes, NASA is ready to assist communities affected by severe storms. We are working together with our federal and state partners to provide a better understanding of what is happening on the ground, in real time. NASA’s Disasters Response Coordination System was designed with the goal of delivering trusted, actionable Earth science information, where and when people need it, to enable effective response when these events strike.”
NASA’s Uninhabited Aerial Synthetic Aperture Radar Vehicle (UAVSAR) instrument is gathering rapid wide area L-Band synthetic aperture radar data shared directly with FEMA and other organizations. Flights are coordinated directly with FEMA to augment their existing satellite and aerial data collection.
Since Hurricane Milton struck, persistent cloud cover over the State of Florida has made it challenging to obtain optical satellite observations of conditions in the region. Synthetic aperture radar instruments, such as those aboard UAVSAR, can see through the clouds to observe changes on the ground. This provides much-needed observations of flood inundation across communities in Florida, as well as the extent of inland river flooding and resource deployment.
The Disaster Response Coordination System has been working closely with FEMA and state emergency management agencies to aid response efforts as Hurricane Milton approached and impacted Florida. The team is actively sharing resources with other agency partners, the state of Florida, and disaster response non-profit organizations.
NASA continues to determine the needs of its partners and is sharing maps and data on the NASA Disasters Mapping Portal as they become available.
Hurricane Milton caused significant wind, flooding, power outages, and damage across central Florida, from Sarasota and Tampa to Palm Springs and the Space Coast. Impacts are currently being assessed alongside lifesaving operations and emergency repairs. The Disasters Response Coordination System is collaborating directly with FEMA, the State of Florida Geospatial Information Office, U.S. Geological Survey, NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), and the American Red Cross. The Disasters Response Coordination System is also sharing any available Earth observation data with NASA’s Kennedy Space Center emergency managers to support their damage assessment process.
By using tools like NASA’s Black Marble, and updating daily with differential analysis done to highlight areas with extended power outages, the agency provides FEMA, states, and non-profits the opportunity to distribute temporary generators, life-sustaining resources, and damage assessments.
The UAVSAR flights are being conducted with support from NASA’s Disasters Program, NASA’s Earth Action Program, and NASA’s Research and Analysis Program, and are being managed by NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, a NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern and California, and the California Institute of Technology.
To learn more about NASA’s Disaster Response Coordination System, visit:
https://disastersresponsecoordinationsystem.gov
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By NASA
Members of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 mission from right to left, NASA astronauts Jeanette Epps, mission specialist; Matthew Dominick, commander; Michael Barratt, pilot; and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin, mission specialist; participate in the Crew Equipment Interface Test at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Friday, Jan. 12, 2024. SpaceX NASA and SpaceX are targeting no earlier than 7:05 a.m. EDT Sunday, Oct. 13, for the agency’s SpaceX Crew-8 mission to undock from the International Space Station. Pending weather conditions, the earliest splashdown time is targeted for 3:38 p.m. Monday, Oct. 14, at one of the multiple zones available off the coast of Florida.
NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, and Jeanette Epps, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin, are completing a seven-month science expedition aboard the orbiting laboratory and will return important and time-sensitive research to Earth.
Mission managers continue monitoring weather conditions in the area, as Dragon’s undocking depends on various factors, including spacecraft readiness, recovery team readiness, weather, sea states, and other factors. NASA will select a specific splashdown time and location closer to the Crew-8 spacecraft undocking.
Watch Crew-8 return activities on NASA+. Learn how to stream NASA content through a variety of additional platforms, including social media. For schedule information, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/live
For the planned Oct. 13 undocking, NASA’s live return operations coverage is as follows (all times Eastern and subject to change based on real-time operations):
Sunday, Oct. 13
5 a.m. – Hatch closure coverage begins on NASA+
5:30 a.m. – Hatch closing
6:45 a.m. – Undocking coverage begins on NASA+
7:05 a.m. – Undocking
Following the conclusion of undocking, NASA coverage will switch to audio only.
Pending weather conditions at the splashdown sites, continuous coverage will resume Oct. 14, on NASA+ prior to the start of deorbit burn.
Monday, Oct. 14
2:30 p.m. – Return coverage begins on NASA+
2:53 p.m. – Deorbit burn (time is approximate)
3:38 p.m. – Splashdown (time is approximate)
5:15 p.m. – Return to Earth media teleconference with the following participants:
Richard Jones, deputy manager, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program Bill Spetch, operations and integration manager, NASA’s International Space Station Program William Gerstenmaier, vice president, Build & Flight Reliability, SpaceX To participate in the teleconference, media must contact the NASA Johnson newsroom by 3 p.m. Oct. 14 at: jsccommu@mail.nasa.gov or 281-483-5111. To ask questions, media must dial in no later than 10 minutes before the start of the call. The agency’s media credentialing policy is available online.
Find full mission coverage, NASA’s commercial crew blog, and more information about the Crew-8 mission at:
https://www.nasa.gov/commercialcrew
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Jimi Russell / Claire O’Shea
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1100
james.j.russell@nasa.gov / claire.a.o’shea@nasa.gov
Raegan Scharfetter / Sandra Jones
Johnson Space Center, Houston
281-483-5111
raegan.r.scharfetter@nasa.gov / sandra.p.jones@nasa.gov
Steve Siceloff / Danielle Sempsrott
Kennedy Space Center, Fla.
321-867-2468
steven.p.siceloff@nasa.gov / danielle.c.sempsrott@nasa.gov
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Last Updated Oct 11, 2024 LocationKennedy Space Center Related Terms
Humans in Space Astronauts Commercial Space International Space Station (ISS) ISS Research Missions View the full article
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By European Space Agency
With all instruments integrated, the first MetOp Second Generation-A, MetOp-SG-A1, weather satellite is now fully assembled and on schedule for liftoff next year. Meanwhile, its sibling, MetOp-SG-B1, is undergoing rigorous testing to ensure that it will withstand the vacuum and extreme temperature swings of space.
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By NASA
Hubble Space Telescope Home NASA’s Hubble, New… 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 Lithographs Fact Sheets Glossary Posters Hubble on the NASA App More Online Activities 6 min read
NASA’s Hubble, New Horizons Team Up for a Simultaneous Look at Uranus
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (left) and NASA’s New Horizon’s spacecraft (right) images the planet Uranus. NASA, ESA, STScI, Samantha Hasler (MIT), Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC), New Horizons Planetary Science Theme Team; Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Joseph Olmsted (STScI)
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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and New Horizons spacecraft simultaneously set their sights on Uranus recently, allowing scientists to make a direct comparison of the planet from two very different viewpoints. The results inform future plans to study like types of planets around other stars.
Astronomers used Uranus as a proxy for similar planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets, comparing high-resolution images from Hubble to the more-distant view from New Horizons. This combined perspective will help scientists learn more about what to expect while imaging planets around other stars with future telescopes.
“While we expected Uranus to appear differently in each filter of the observations, we found that Uranus was actually dimmer than predicted in the New Horizons data taken from a different viewpoint,” said lead author Samantha Hasler of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and New Horizons science team collaborator.
In this image, two three-dimensional shapes (top) of Uranus are compared to the actual views of the planet from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (bottom left) and NASA’s New Horizon’s spacecraft (bottom right). Comparing high-resolution images from Hubble to the smaller view from New Horizons offers a combined perspective that will help researchers learn more about what to expect while imaging planets around other stars with future observatories. NASA, ESA, STScI, Samantha Hasler (MIT), Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC), New Horizons Planetary Science Theme Team; Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Joseph Olmsted (STScI)
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Direct imaging of exoplanets is a key technique for learning about their potential habitability, and offers new clues to the origin and formation of our own solar system. Astronomers use both direct imaging and spectroscopy to collect light from the observed planet and compare its brightness at different wavelengths. However, imaging exoplanets is a notoriously difficult process because they’re so far away. Their images are mere pinpoints and so are not as detailed as the close-up views that we have of worlds orbiting our Sun. Researchers can also only directly image exoplanets at “partial phases,” when only a portion of the planet is illuminated by their star as seen from Earth.
Uranus was an ideal target as a test for understanding future distant observations of exoplanets by other telescopes for a few reasons. First, many known exoplanets are also gas giants similar in nature. Also, at the time of the observations, New Horizons was on the far side of Uranus, 6.5 billion miles away, allowing its twilight crescent to be studied—something that cannot be done from Earth. At that distance, the New Horizons view of the planet was just several pixels in its color camera, called the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera.
On the other hand, Hubble, with its high resolution, and in its low-Earth orbit 1.7 billion miles away from Uranus, was able to see atmospheric features such as clouds and storms on the day side of the gaseous world.
“Uranus appears as just a small dot on the New Horizons observations, similar to the dots seen of directly-imaged exoplanets from observatories like Webb or ground-based observatories,” added Hasler. “Hubble provides context for what the atmosphere is doing when it was observed with New Horizons.”
The gas giant planets in our solar system have dynamic and variable atmospheres with changing cloud cover. How common is this among exoplanets? By knowing the details of what the clouds on Uranus looked like from Hubble, researchers are able to verify what is interpreted from the New Horizons data. In the case of Uranus, both Hubble and New Horizons saw that the brightness did not vary as the planet rotated, which indicates that the cloud features were not changing with the planet’s rotation.
However, the importance of the detection by New Horizons has to do with how the planet reflects light at a different phase than what Hubble, or other observatories on or near Earth, can see. New Horizons showed that exoplanets may be dimmer than predicted at partial and high phase angles, and that the atmosphere reflects light differently at partial phase.
NASA has two major upcoming observatories in the works to advance studies of exoplanet atmospheres and potential habitability.
“These landmark New Horizons studies of Uranus from a vantage point unobservable by any other means add to the mission’s treasure trove of new scientific knowledge, and have, like many other datasets obtained in the mission, yielded surprising new insights into the worlds of our solar system,” added New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute.
This illustration shows NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft’s view of our solar system from deep in the Kuiper Belt. New Horizons is currently at an estimated distance of more than 5 billion miles from Earth. The probe was 6.5 billion miles away from Uranus when it recently observed the planet. In this study, researchers used the gas giant as an exoplanet proxy, comparing high-resolution images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to the smaller view from New Horizons to learn more about what to expect while imaging planets around other stars. NASA, ESA, Christian Nieves (STScI), Ralf Crawford (STScI), Greg Bacon (STScI)
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NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, set to launch by 2027, will use a coronagraph to block out a star’s light to directly see gas giant exoplanets. NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory, in an early planning phase, will be the first telescope designed specifically to search for atmospheric biosignatures on Earth-sized, rocky planets orbiting other stars.
“Studying how known benchmarks like Uranus appear in distant imaging can help us have more robust expectations when preparing for these future missions,” concluded Hasler. “And that will be critical to our success.”
Launched in January 2006, New Horizons made the historic flyby of Pluto and its moons in July 2015, before giving humankind its first close-up look at one of these planetary building block and Kuiper Belt object, Arrokoth, in January 2019. New Horizons is now in its second extended mission, studying distant Kuiper Belt objects, characterizing the outer heliosphere of the Sun, and making important astrophysical observations from its unmatched vantage point in distant regions of the solar system.
The Uranus results are being presented this week at the 56th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences, in Boise, Idaho.
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, Colorado, also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.
The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Southwest Research Institute, based in San Antonio and Boulder, Colorado, directs the mission via Principal Investigator Alan Stern and leads the science team, payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons is part of NASA’s New Frontiers program, managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Facebook logo @NASAHubble @NASAHubble Instagram logo @NASAHubble Media Contacts:
Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
Hannah Braun, Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD
Science Contacts:
Samantha Hasler
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
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Last Updated Oct 09, 2024 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
Astrophysics Division Goddard Space Flight Center Hubble Space Telescope New Horizons Planetary Science Planetary Science Division Planets The Solar System Uranus Keep Exploring Explore More
Hubble Space Telescope
Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.
New Horizons
New Horizons was the first spacecraft to explore Pluto and its five moons up close and, later, made the first…
Studying the Outer Planets and Moons
Hubble Online Activities
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By NASA
Learn Home How Do Astronauts Get in… Astronauts Overview Learning Resources Science Activation Teams SME Map Opportunities More Science Activation Stories Citizen Science 2 min read
How Do Astronauts Get in Shape? – New “Ask SME” from NASA eClips
The NASA Science Activation program’s NASA eClips project, led by the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA), aims to increase Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics (STEM) literacy and inspire the next generation of engineers and scientists by providing effective web-based, standards-aligned, in-school and out-of-school learning and teaching resources through the lens of NASA.
As a part of this work, NASA eClips professionally produces the Ask SME: Close-up With a NASA Subject Matter Expert video series to capture a glimpse of NASA SME’s personal interests and career journeys. Each video can be used to spark student interest and broaden their ideas of who the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) workforce might include (everyone!) and the kinds of work they do.
On September 19, 2024, NASA eClips released the most recent video in the Ask SME series, featuring Corey Twine from NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Twine is an Astronaut Strength and Conditioning Specialist who works with astronauts to keep them physically fit for work on Earth and while they are in space. He shares insights about how he helps the astronauts and what inspired him to pursue this career.
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NASA eClips is supported by NASA under cooperative agreement award number NNX16AB91A and is part of NASA’s Science Activation Portfolio. Learn more about how Science Activation connects NASA science experts, real content, and experiences with community leaders to do science in ways that activate minds and promote deeper understanding of our world and beyond: https://science.nasa.gov/learn
SME Corey Twine, Astronaut Strength & Conditioning Specialist Share
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Last Updated Oct 09, 2024 Editor NASA Science Editorial Team Location Johnson Space Center Related Terms
Astronauts For Educators People of Johnson Science Activation Explore More
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