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By NASA
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft is 6 days and less than 50 million miles (80 million km) away from its second close encounter with an asteroid; this time, the small main belt asteroid Donaldjohanson.
Download high-resolution video and images from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio.
NASA/Dan Gallagher This upcoming event represents a comprehensive “dress rehearsal” for Lucy’s main mission over the next decade: the exploration of multiple Trojan asteroids that share Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun. Lucy’s first asteroid encounter – a flyby of the tiny main belt asteroid Dinkinesh and its satellite, Selam, on Nov. 1, 2023 – provided the team with an opportunity for a systems test that they will be building on during the upcoming flyby.
Lucy’s closest approach to Donaldjohanson will occur at 1:51pm EDT on April 20, at a distance of 596 miles (960 km). About 30 minutes before closest approach, Lucy will orient itself to track the asteroid, during which its high-gain antenna will turn away from Earth, suspending communication. Guided by its terminal tracking system, Lucy will autonomously rotate to keep Donaldjohanson in view. As it does this, Lucy will carry out a more complicated observing sequence than was used at Dinkinesh. All three science instruments – the high-resolution greyscale imager called L’LORRI, the color imager and infrared spectrometer called L’Ralph, and the far infrared spectrometer called L’TES – will carry out observation sequences very similar to the ones that will occur at the Trojan asteroids.
However, unlike with Dinkinesh, Lucy will stop tracking Donaldjohanson 40 seconds before the closest approach to protect its sensitive instruments from intense sunlight.
“If you were sitting on the asteroid watching the Lucy spacecraft approaching, you would have to shield your eyes staring at the Sun while waiting for Lucy to emerge from the glare. After Lucy passes the asteroid, the positions will be reversed, so we have to shield the instruments in the same way,” said encounter phase lead Michael Vincent of Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. “These instruments are designed to photograph objects illuminated by sunlight 25 times dimmer than at Earth, so looking toward the Sun could damage our cameras.”
Fortunately, this is the only one of Lucy’s seven asteroid encounters with this challenging geometry. During the Trojan encounters, as with Dinkinesh, the spacecraft will be able to collect data throughout the entire encounter.
After closest approach, the spacecraft will “pitch back,” reorienting its solar arrays back toward the Sun. Approximately an hour later, the spacecraft will re-establish communication with Earth.
“One of the weird things to wrap your brain around with these deep space missions is how slow the speed of light is,” continued Vincent. “Lucy is 12.5 light minutes away from Earth, meaning it takes that long for any signal we send to reach the spacecraft. Then it takes another 12.5 minutes before we get Lucy’s response telling us we were heard. So, when we command the data playback after closest approach, it takes 25 minutes from when we ask to see the pictures before we get any of them to the ground.”
Once the spacecraft’s health is confirmed, engineers will command Lucy to transmit the science data from the encounter back to Earth, which is a process that will take several days.
Donaldjohanson is a fragment from a collision 150 million years ago, making it one of the youngest main belt asteroids ever visited by a spacecraft.
“Every asteroid has a different story to tell, and these stories weave together to paint the history of our solar system,” said Tom Statler, Lucy mission program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The fact that each new asteroid we visit knocks our socks off means we’re only beginning to understand the depth and richness of that history. Telescopic observations are hinting that Donaldjohanson is going to have an interesting story, and I’m fully expecting to be surprised – again.”
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, designed and built the L’Ralph instrument and provides overall mission management, systems engineering and safety and mission assurance for Lucy. Hal Levison of SwRI’s office in Boulder, Colorado, is the principal investigator. SwRI, headquartered in San Antonio, also leads the science team and the mission’s science observation planning and data processing. Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado, built the spacecraft, designed the original orbital trajectory and provides flight operations. Goddard and KinetX Aerospace are responsible for navigating the Lucy spacecraft. The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed and built the L’LORRI (Lucy Long Range Reconnaissance Imager) instrument. Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, designed and build the L’TES (Lucy Thermal Emission Spectrometer) instrument. Lucy is the thirteenth mission in NASA’s Discovery Program, which is managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
By Katherine Kretke, Southwest Research Institute
Media Contact:
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
Nancy N. Jones
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Apr 14, 2025 EditorMadison OlsonContactNancy N. Jonesnancy.n.jones@nasa.govLocationGoddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
Lucy Goddard Space Flight Center Planetary Science Explore More
4 min read New Modeling Assesses Age of Next Target Asteroid for NASA’s Lucy
Article 4 weeks ago 3 min read NASA’s Lucy Spacecraft Takes Its 1st Images of Asteroid Donaldjohanson
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Article 2 years ago View the full article
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By NASA
Explore This Section 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 Deployment 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 5 Min Read NASA Webb Explores Effect of Strong Magnetic Fields on Star Formation
An image of the Milky Way captured by the MeerKAT radio telescope array puts the James Webb Space Telescope’s image of the Sagittarius C region in context. Full image below. Credits:
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, SARAO, Samuel Crowe (UVA), John Bally (CU), Ruben Fedriani (IAA-CSIC), Ian Heywood (Oxford) Follow-up research on a 2023 image of the Sagittarius C stellar nursery in the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, has revealed ejections from still-forming protostars and insights into the impact of strong magnetic fields on interstellar gas and the life cycle of stars.
“A big question in the Central Molecular Zone of our galaxy has been, if there is so much dense gas and cosmic dust here, and we know that stars form in such clouds, why are so few stars born here?” said astrophysicist John Bally of the University of Colorado Boulder, one of the principal investigators. “Now, for the first time, we are seeing directly that strong magnetic fields may play an important role in suppressing star formation, even at small scales.”
Detailed study of stars in this crowded, dusty region has been limited, but Webb’s advanced near-infrared instruments have allowed astronomers to see through the clouds to study young stars like never before.
“The extreme environment of the galactic center is a fascinating place to put star formation theories to the test, and the infrared capabilities of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope provide the opportunity to build on past important observations from ground-based telescopes like ALMA and MeerKAT,” said Samuel Crowe, another principal investigator on the research, a senior undergraduate at the University of Virginia and a 2025 Rhodes Scholar.
Bally and Crowe each led a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal.
Image A: Milky Way Center (MeerKAT and Webb)
An image of the Milky Way captured by the MeerKAT (formerly the Karoo Array Telescope) radio telescope array puts the James Webb Space Telescope’s image of the Sagittarius C region in context. Like a super-long exposure photograph, MeerKAT shows the bubble-like remnants of supernovas that exploded over millennia, capturing the dynamic nature of the Milky Way’s chaotic core. At the center of the MeerKAT image the region surrounding the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole blazes bright. Huge vertical filamentary structures echo those captured on a smaller scale by Webb in Sagittarius C’s blue-green hydrogen cloud. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, SARAO, Samuel Crowe (UVA), John Bally (CU), Ruben Fedriani (IAA-CSIC), Ian Heywood (Oxford) Image B: Milky Way Center (MeerKAT and Webb), Labeled
The star-forming region Sagittarius C, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, is about 200 light-years from the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*. The spectral index at the lower left shows how color was assigned to the radio data to create the image. On the negative end, there is non-thermal emission, stimulated by electrons spiraling around magnetic field lines. On the positive side, thermal emission is coming from hot, ionized plasma. For Webb, color is assigned by shifting the infrared spectrum to visible light colors. The shortest infrared wavelengths are bluer, and the longer wavelengths appear more red. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, SARAO, Samuel Crowe (UVA), John Bally (CU), Ruben Fedriani (IAA-CSIC), Ian Heywood (Oxford) Using Infrared to Reveal Forming Stars
In Sagittarius C’s brightest cluster, the researchers confirmed the tentative finding from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) that two massive stars are forming there. Along with infrared data from NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope and SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) mission, as well as the Herschel Space Observatory, they used Webb to determine that each of the massive protostars is already more than 20 times the mass of the Sun. Webb also revealed the bright outflows powered by each protostar.
Even more challenging is finding low-mass protostars, still shrouded in cocoons of cosmic dust. Researchers compared Webb’s data with ALMA’s past observations to identify five likely low-mass protostar candidates.
The team also identified 88 features that appear to be shocked hydrogen gas, where material being blasted out in jets from young stars impacts the surrounding gas cloud. Analysis of these features led to the discovery of a new star-forming cloud, distinct from the main Sagittarius C cloud, hosting at least two protostars powering their own jets.
“Outflows from forming stars in Sagittarius C have been hinted at in past observations, but this is the first time we’ve been able to confirm them in infrared light. It’s very exciting to see, because there is still a lot we don’t know about star formation, especially in the Central Molecular Zone, and it’s so important to how the universe works,” said Crowe.
Magnetic Fields and Star Formation
Webb’s 2023 image of Sagittarius C showed dozens of distinctive filaments in a region of hot hydrogen plasma surrounding the main star-forming cloud. New analysis by Bally and his team has led them to hypothesize that the filaments are shaped by magnetic fields, which have also been observed in the past by the ground-based observatories ALMA and MeerKAT (formerly the Karoo Array Telescope).
“The motion of gas swirling in the extreme tidal forces of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, can stretch and amplify the surrounding magnetic fields. Those fields, in turn, are shaping the plasma in Sagittarius C,” said Bally.
The researchers think that the magnetic forces in the galactic center may be strong enough to keep the plasma from spreading, instead confining it into the concentrated filaments seen in the Webb image. These strong magnetic fields may also resist the gravity that would typically cause dense clouds of gas and dust to collapse and forge stars, explaining Sagittarius C’s lower-than-expected star formation rate.
“This is an exciting area for future research, as the influence of strong magnetic fields, in the center of our galaxy or other galaxies, on stellar ecology has not been fully considered,” said Crowe.
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).
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View/Download the science paper led by Bally from the The Astrophysical Journal.
View/Download the science paper led by Crowe from the The Astrophysical Journal.
Media Contacts
Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Leah Ramsay – lramsay@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
Christine Pulliam – cpulliam@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
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Read more: press releases about the center of the Milky Way
NASA’s Universe of Learning: ViewSpace Interactive image tour of the center of the Milky Way
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Last Updated Apr 02, 2025 Editor Marty McCoy Contact Laura Betz laura.e.betz@nasa.gov Related Terms
James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Astrophysics Galaxies Galaxies, Stars, & Black Holes Goddard Space Flight Center Protostars Science & Research Stars The Milky Way The Universe View the full article
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By European Space Agency
The European Space Agency (ESA) has powered down its Gaia spacecraft after more than a decade spent gathering data that are now being used to unravel the secrets of our home galaxy.
On 27 March 2025, Gaia’s control team at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre carefully switched off the spacecraft’s subsystems and sent it into a ‘retirement orbit’ around the Sun.
Though the spacecraft’s operations are now over, the scientific exploitation of Gaia’s data has just begun.
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By NASA
NASA/Brandon Torres Navarrete Engineers at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, Bohdan Wesely, right, and Eli Hiss, left, complete a fit check of the two halves of a space capsule that will study the clouds of Venus for signs of life.
Led by Rocket Lab of Long Beach, California, and their partners at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Rocket Lab’s Venus mission will be the first private mission to the planet.
NASA’s role is to help the commercial space endeavor succeed by providing expertise in thermal protection of small spacecraft. Invented at Ames, NASA’s Heatshield for Extreme Entry Environment Technology (HEEET) – the brown, textured material covering the bottom of the capsule in this photo – is a woven heat shield designed to protect spacecraft from temperatures up to 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit. The probe will deploy from Rocket Lab’s Photon spacecraft bus, taking measurements as it descends through the planet’s atmosphere.
Teams at Ames work with private companies, like Rocket Lab, to turn NASA materials into solutions such as the heat shield tailor-made for this spacecraft destined for Venus, supporting growth of the new space economy. NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology program, part of the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, supported development of the heat shield for Rocket Lab’s Venus mission.
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By NASA
5 Min Read NASA’s EZIE Launching to Study Magnetic Fingerprints of Earth’s Aurora
High above Earth’s poles, intense electrical currents called electrojets flow through the upper atmosphere when auroras glow in the sky. These auroral electrojets push about a million amps of electrical charge around the poles every second. They can create some of the largest magnetic disturbances on the ground, and rapid changes in the currents can lead to effects such as power outages. In March, NASA plans to launch its EZIE (Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer) mission to learn more about these powerful currents, in the hopes of ultimately mitigating the effects of such space weather for humans on Earth.
Results from EZIE will help NASA better understand the dynamics of the Earth-Sun connection and help improve predictions of hazardous space weather that can harm astronauts, interfere with satellites, and trigger power outages.
The EZIE mission includes three CubeSats, each about the size of a carry-on suitcase. These small satellites will fly in a pearls-on-a-string formation, following each other as they orbit Earth from pole to pole about 350 miles (550 kilometers) overhead. The spacecraft will look down toward the electrojets, which flow about 60 miles (100 kilometers) above the ground in an electrified layer of Earth’s atmosphere called the ionosphere.
During every orbit, each EZIE spacecraft will map the electrojets to uncover their structure and evolution. The spacecraft will fly over the same region 2 to 10 minutes apart from one another, revealing how the electrojets change.
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NASA’s EZIE (Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer) mission will use three CubeSats to map Earth’s auroral electrojets — intense electric currents that flow high above Earth’s polar regions when auroras glow in the sky. As the trio orbits Earth, each satellite will use four dishes pointed at different angles to measure magnetic fields created by the electrojets. NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben Previous ground-based experiments and spacecraft have observed auroral electrojets, which are a small part of a vast electric circuit that extends 100,000 miles (160,000 kilometers) from Earth to space. But for decades, scientists have debated what the overall system looks like and how it evolves. The mission team expects EZIE to resolve that debate.
“What EZIE does is unique,” said Larry Kepko, EZIE mission scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “EZIE is the first mission dedicated exclusively to studying the electrojets, and it does so with a completely new measurement technique.”
EZIE is the first mission dedicated exclusively to studying the electrojets.
Larry Kepko
EZIE mission scientist, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
This technique involves looking at microwave emission from oxygen molecules about 10 miles (16 kilometers) below the electrojets. Normally, oxygen molecules emit microwaves at a frequency of 118 Gigahertz. However, the electrojets create a magnetic field that can split apart that 118 Gigahertz emission line in a process called Zeeman splitting. The stronger the magnetic field, the farther apart the line is split.
Each of the three EZIE spacecraft will carry an instrument called the Microwave Electrojet Magnetogram to observe the Zeeman effect and measure the strength and direction of the electrojets’ magnetic fields. Built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, each of these instruments will use four antennas pointed at different angles to survey the magnetic fields along four different tracks as EZIE orbits.
The technology used in the Microwave Electrojet Magnetograms was originally developed to study Earth’s atmosphere and weather systems. Engineers at JPL had reduced the size of the radio detectors so they could fit on small satellites, including NASA’s TEMPEST-D and CubeRRT missions, and improved the components that separate light into specific wavelengths.
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NASA’s EZIE (Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer) mission will investigate Earth’s auroral electrojets, which flow high above Earth’s polar regions when auroras (northern and southern lights) glow. By providing unprecedented measurements of these electrical currents, EZIE will answer decades-old mysteries. Understanding these currents will also improve scientists’ capabilities for predicting hazardous space weather. NASA/Johns Hopkins APL The electrojets flow through a region that is difficult to study directly, as it’s too high for scientific balloons to reach but too low for satellites to dwell.
“The utilization of the Zeeman technique to remotely map current-induced magnetic fields is really a game-changing approach to get these measurements at an altitude that is notoriously difficult to measure,” said Sam Yee, EZIE’s principal investigator at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.
The mission is also including citizen scientists to enhance its research, distributing dozens of EZIE-Mag magnetometer kits to students in the U.S. and volunteers around the world to compare EZIE’s observations to those from Earth. “EZIE scientists will be collecting magnetic field data from above, and the students will be collecting magnetic field data from the ground,” said Nelli Mosavi-Hoyer, EZIE project manager at APL.
EZIE scientists will be collecting magnetic field data from above, and the students will be collecting magnetic field data from the ground.
Nelli Mosavi-Hoyer
EZIE project manager, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory
The EZIE spacecraft will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California as part of the Transporter-13 rideshare mission with SpaceX via launch integrator Maverick Space Systems.
The mission will launch during what’s known as solar maximum — a phase during the 11-year solar cycle when the Sun’s activity is stronger and more frequent. This is an advantage for EZIE’s science.
“It’s better to launch during solar max,” Kepko said. “The electrojets respond directly to solar activity.”
The EZIE mission will also work alongside other NASA heliophysics missions, including PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere), launching in late February to study how material in the Sun’s outer atmosphere becomes the solar wind.
According to Yee, EZIE’s CubeSat mission not only allows scientists to address compelling questions that have not been able to answer for decades but also demonstrates that great science can be achieved cost-effectively.
“We’re leveraging the new capability of CubeSats,” Kepko added. “This is a mission that couldn’t have flown a decade ago. It’s pushing the envelope of what is possible, all on a small satellite. It’s exciting to think about what we will discover.”
The EZIE mission is funded by the Heliophysics Division within NASA’s Science Mission Directorate and is managed by the Explorers Program Office at NASA Goddard. APL leads the mission for NASA. Blue Canyon Technologies in Boulder, Colorado, built the CubeSats.
by Vanessa Thomas
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Header Image:
An artist’s concept shows the three EZIE satellites orbiting Earth.
Credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben
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Last Updated Feb 25, 2025 Related Terms
Heliophysics Auroras EZIE (Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer) Goddard Space Flight Center Missions Small Satellite Missions The Sun Explore More
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