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By NASA
2 min read
August’s Night Sky Notes: Seeing Double
by Kat Troche of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific
During the summer months, we tend to miss the views of Saturn, Jupiter and other heavenly bodies. But it can be a great time to look for other items, like globular star clusters such as Messier 13, open star clusters such as the Coma Star Cluster (Melotte 111), but also double stars!
Mid-August night sky constellations with the following multiple star systems highlighted: the Double Double in Lyra, Albireo in Cygnus, Polaris in Ursa Minor, Mizar and Alcor in Ursa Major. Credit: Stellarium Web What Are Double Stars?
If you have seen any movies or read any books that refer to having two suns in the sky, that would be a double star system. These star systems typically come in two types – binary and optical doubles. Binary stars are two stars that are gravitationally bound and orbit each other, and optical double stars only appear to be close together when viewed from Earth, but in reality, are extremely far apart from another, and are not affected by each other’s gravity. With a small telescope, in moderately light polluted skies, summer offers great views of these stellar groupings from the Northern Hemisphere:
Double Double: also known by its technical name, Epsilon Lyrae, this multiple star system appears as one star with naked eye observing. But with a small telescope, it can be split into ‘two’ stars. A large telescope reveals Epsilon Lyrae’s secret – what looks like a single star is actually a quadruple star system! Albireo: a gorgeous double star set – one blue, one yellow – in the constellation Cygnus. Polaris: while technically a multiple star system, our North Star can easily be separated from one star to two with a modest telescope. Mizar and Alcor: located in the handle of the Big Dipper, this pair can be seen with the naked eye.
This schematic shows the configuration of the sextuple star system TYC 7037-89-1. The inner quadruple is composed of two binaries, A and C, which orbit each other every four years or so. An outer binary, B, orbits the quadruple roughly every 2,000 years. All three pairs are eclipsing binaries. The orbits shown are not to scale.NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Aside from looking incredible in a telescope or binoculars, double stars help astronomers learn about measuring the mass of stars, and about stellar evolution. Some stars orbit each other a little too closely, and things can become disastrous, but overall, these celestial bodies make for excellent targets and are simple crowd pleasers.
Up next, learn about the Summer Triangle’s hidden treasures on our mid-month article on the Night Sky Network page.
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By NASA
5 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
When a physical condition limits mobility, getting around is easier with EyeGaze Edge. The eye-tracking technology integrates with the Ability Drive application used with motorized mobility devices, enabling hands-free control of a wheelchair’s motion. Credit: EyeGaze Inc. Communicating when a traumatic brain injury, stroke, or disease has made speech impossible can be daunting. Specialized eye-tracking technology uses eye movement to enable people living with disabilities to connect one-on-one, over the phone, or via the internet.
Eye-tracking systems for computers pinpoint a person’s gaze – where the eye is looking at a screen – by reflecting infrared light off the cornea and capturing it with a camera, using image-processing software to determine the eye’s orientation. The technology isn’t new, but it has become much more widely accessible, thanks in part to a collaboration between NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and a Fairfax, Virginia-based company called Eyegaze Inc.
When the company built the first model in 1988, its computers were bulky, requiring three shipping boxes for equipment and a company staff member to set up the system. That cost limited access, and the learning process could be intimidating.
In 1998, NASA and Eyegaze entered a public-private partnership via Congressional funding to make the hardware smaller, more portable, and affordable without compromising efficiency. It also reduced the weight of the original system by six times and its volume by nearly the same factor. Other advancements served as a springboard for two more decades of development. By collaborating with JPL, the two entities were able to miniaturize and improve the company’s Eyegaze Edge system and lower costs, eliminating barriers to ownership of this communications technology.
“Working with NASA, we were able to make the device less bulky,” said Preethi Vaidyanathan, an engineer with Eyegaze. “Since then, we integrated the external components into a small camera.” It mounts above or below a standard computer screen and requires less than 15 seconds to calibrate to an individual’s gaze.
Visual Surfing
Minesweeper and other video games adapted to use eye-tracking technology are just one form of entertainment made possible by EyeGaze for people living with disabilities.Credit: EyeGaze Inc. As personal electronic devices and internet access became commonplace, Eyegaze customers wanted to do more than type. The company’s work with NASA and other government partners put it in a position to meet that demand.
Eyeworld integrates with computers, mobile phones, and tablets, allowing the Eyegaze camera to function as an external mouse and keyboard. By enabling almost any computer function, it lets users chat online, post to social media, send emails, text, or make phone calls. It’s also possible to change room lighting, adjust thermostat settings, and operate other environmental controls using Amazon Echo and Google Home via pages of specialized buttons with one-glance button controls.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Eyegaze integrated communications programs such as Zoom and WhatsApp to allow people to connect with their family and friends. To help combat a sense of isolation, the company added meditation apps and Window Swap, which stream the views from different windows worldwide. Virtual museums take the viewer on guided tours. A music streaming service syncs to favorite music apps and offers the International Radio Garden app to sample music from other cultures. Access to online gaming communities provides another way to connect.
“We are constantly thinking about what the customers want. One thing is freedom of movement, so controlling a wheelchair gives them that to some extent,” said Vaidyanathan. Eyegaze Edge integrates with the Ability Drive application used with motorized mobility devices. Looking at a specific button enables hands-free control of a wheelchair’s motion.
The Right to Speak
Eye-tracking hardware and software make it possible for a person to communicate using the movement of their eyes. This keyboard screen is one of many Eyegaze developed for people with a full range of eye motion. A vertical keyboard is available for those who can only look up and down. Credit: EyeGaze Inc.
Numerous medical conditions can lead to the kind of physical paralysis making it impossible to speak. Well-publicized brain and spinal cord injuries in athletes have led to broader awareness. But there are a host of other causes, such as cerebral palsy, ALS, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, and spinal muscular atrophy. These conditions can result in locked-in syndrome, which paralyzes all voluntary muscles except those that control eye movement. Eye-tracking software is a lifeline for patients, using what may be their only remaining voluntary movement, but even that can be impeded.
Eyegaze Edge measures several eye features, making it possible for the tracker to work even when less of the pupil is visible. The company employs clinical specialists who can troubleshoot issues that may prevent customers from using the system, eye conditions like cataracts, dry eyes, and eyelids that droop, partly covering the pupil.
The company now serves individuals in 44 countries, including nations in Southeast Asia and Africa. Adults, children as young as 18 months old, military veterans, and others can communicate using only their eyes. If only vertical eye movement is possible, Eyegaze Edge offers a special vertical keyboard screen. Pages of commonly used phrases communicate a statement with a single glance. Large, easy-to-use buttons allow patients to communicate directly with healthcare providers and caregivers for everyday needs.
Clinicians use Eyegaze Edge and teach their patients how to communicate using the technology. In some cases, Vaidyanathan said, this technology even allows people to share their final thoughts with family and friends.
“NASA helped us get our technology to the size of a laptop – small and sleek. But we continue to investigate and design our solutions to meet ongoing needs. Communication is a key right, so we must accommodate these different challenges,” she said.
NASA has a long history of transferring technology to the private sector. The agency’s Spinoff publication profiles NASA technologies that have transformed into commercial products and services, demonstrating the broader benefits of America’s investment in its space program. Spinoff is a publication of the Technology Transfer program in NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD).
For more information on how NASA brings space technology down to Earth, visit:
spinoff.nasa.gov
By Margo Pierce
NASA’s Spinoff Publication
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Last Updated Feb 20, 2024 Related Terms
Spinoffs Space Technology Mission Directorate Technology Transfer Technology Transfer & Spinoffs Explore More
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By NASA
5 Min Read Seeing and Believing: 15 Years of Exoplanet Images
Beta Pictoris is located about 60 light-years away toward the constellation of Pictor (the Painter’s Easel) and is one of the best-known examples of a star surrounded by a dusty debris disk. Earlier observations showed a warp of the disc, a secondary inclined disc and comets falling onto the star, all indirect, but tell-tale signs that strongly suggested the presence of a massive planet. Observations by ESO proved the presence of a planet around Beta Pictoris, and another planet was later discovered. To see the planets, we must block the light of the star. Credits: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2 First there was a gloriously dusty disk. Then the traceable tracks of “exocomets.” But 15 years ago this fall, the star system Beta Pictoris yielded one of the most iconic pictures in astrophysics: a direct image of a planet orbiting another star.
The young, bright star, some 63 light-years distant and visible to the naked eye, all but overwhelmed the faint light of the planet. When astronomers, using a European Southern Observatory telescope, subtracted the starlight, all that remained of the planet was a tiny dot, a few pixels. But it was enough to throw open a new window on direct imaging.
This composite image represents the close environment of Beta Pictoris as seen in near infrared light. The exoplanet Beta Pictoris b is the small dot next to the masked star at the center. This very faint environment is revealed after a very careful subtraction of the much brighter stellar halo. The outer part of the image shows the reflected light on the dust disk, as observed in 1996 by a European Southern Observatory ground telescope. The newly detected source is more than 1000 times fainter than Beta Pictoris, aligned with the disc, at a projected distance of 8 times the Earth-Sun distance. ESO/A.-M. Lagrange et al. “After that, I knew what I wanted to do in astronomy,” said Marie Ygouf, a researcher who specializes in direct imaging of exoplanets – planets around other stars – at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
An undergraduate when she first saw the image of the planet, called Beta Pictoris b, Ygouf said she was awestruck.
“It was so exciting to try to take pictures of exoplanets, to try to detect life on another planet,” she said. “I was sold.”
Today the Beta Pictoris system, called Beta Pic for short, is famous for the early, breathtaking images of its surrounding disk of dusty debris, and for abundant evidence of exocomets, or comets detected in star systems other than our own. The discovery of a second planet in the system, Beta Pictoris c, was revealed to much scientific excitement in 2018.
It is, as one astronomer said, the gift that keeps on giving.
But the scientists deeply involved in early observations of the system had a bit of an uphill struggle convincing some colleagues that their groundbreaking discoveries were real, said Anne-Marie Lagrange, an astronomer at LESIA, Observatoire de Paris, who has been working to understand the system for more than 30 years.
As an intern, Lagrange began her work on Beta Pic in the mid-1980s, just after the disk image made its big splash. Among her research milestones was the discovery, in the late 1980s, of massive clumps of gas falling onto the surface of the system’s central star – and at high rates of speed, up to 200 miles (350 kilometers) per second.
Lagrange and her fellow researchers relied on observations from the IUE (International Ultraviolet Explorer) satellite – “an ancestor” of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, she said – to propose that the infalling gas was caused by evaporating comets.
“They were the first exocomets [observed] around another star,” she said. “At the beginning, many people were laughing at it.” The findings held up, and the presence of exocomets in the system was confirmed by further observations announced in 2022.
With this technique, we may be able to answer that very fundamental question: Is there any life in the universe outside of Earth?”
Marie Ygouf
Researcher on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope science team
In the mid 1990s, relying on the recently launched Hubble as well as increasingly sophisticated ground-based instruments, scientists realized that the debris disk around Beta Pictoris was warped, like a vinyl record left too long in the Sun.
Computer modeling results suggested the warp was a gravitational skew caused by an orbiting planet. And in 2008, after long effort, Lagrange and her team hit paydirt: a direct image of the giant, gaseous planet, so young it was still glowing from its recent formation.
“The nice thing is, we predicted it 10 years before,” she said.
The future of exoplanet imaging
Still a relatively minor player in the detection of exoplanets, direct imaging’s role will expand in the years and decades to come, promising deep insights into the nature of distant planets as technology improves. But even then, each “image” of a planet will still be just a handful of pixels.
That might sound disappointing, especially in the era of spectacular sci-fi movie effects. If we find an “Earth-like” planet, we won’t see continents and oceans – at least not yet. But that tiny dot of light will contain a flood of information: details of the planet’s atmosphere, clouds, temperature, and perhaps even signs of some form of life.
By splitting the light from that tiny dot into a spectrum of colors, scientists can spot missing lines from that spectrum – slices of light absorbed by molecules in the planet’s atmosphere as starlight is reflected from the atmosphere or surface. The missing slices correspond to specific gases and molecules in the planet’s atmosphere, a detection method known as spectroscopy.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is already using onboard spectrographs to tease out the components of exoplanet atmospheres. In the years ahead, the agency’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, to be launched by May 2027, is designed to study the cloudy atmospheres of mature, Jupiter-sized exoplanets. The Habitable Worlds Observatory, a mission concept now in the early planning stages, is expected to refine this technology, to measure the atmospheric composition of small, rocky planets like our own, all from those little dots of directly imaged exoplanets.
Ygouf is part of the project science team for the Roman telescope’s coronagraph instrument, which will block the glare from a parent star so the light from its planets can be detected. Meant to be a technology demonstration, the instrument includes two flexible mirrors to correct distortions in the light caused by the instrument and by the telescope itself.
She says the direct imaging techniques that caught fire with Beta Pictoris could someday solve one of the ultimate mysteries.
“With this technique, we may be able to answer that very fundamental question: Is there any life in the universe outside of Earth?” she said. “It’s astonishing, incredible, that from a few pixels we’ll be able to learn so many things about a planet: whether those planets are terrestrial or gaseous, whether they have an atmosphere or not. If it’s done right, in the future we may be able to create pretty maps of those planets, seeing potential clouds. It may be a few pixels, but [there’s] so much information you can get from that.”
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Last Updated Dec 12, 2023 Related Terms
Exoplanet Discoveries Exoplanet Transits Exoplanets Hubble Space Telescope James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Uncategorized Explore More
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By NASA
The NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s reveals a portion of the Milky Way’s dense core in a new light. An estimated 500,000 stars shine in this image of the Sagittarius C (Sgr C) region, along with some as-yet unidentified features. A large region of ionized hydrogen, shown in cyan, contains intriguing needle-like structures that lack any uniform orientation.NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, and S. Crowe (University of Virginia) A star-forming region, named Sagittarius C (Sgr C), is seen in exceptional detail in this image from Nov. 20, 2023, thanks to the Near-Infrared Camera instrument on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. An estimated 500,000 stars shine in this image of the Sgr C region, along with some never-before-seen features astronomers have yet to explain.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, and S. Crowe (University of Virginia)
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By NASA
NASA The crew of the International Space Station saw this view of the north coast of the Mexican state of Baja California Sur as the space station orbited 258 miles above on Oct. 14, 2023.
In 24 hours, the space station makes 16 orbits of Earth, traveling through 16 sunrises and sunsets. The station’s orbital path takes it over 90 percent of the Earth’s population, with astronauts taking millions of images of the planet below. See more photos of our planet here.
Image credit: NASA
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