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Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft launch delayed due to rocket fault
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft launch delayed due to rocket fault
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is about to make its first crewed flight
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is about to make its first crewed flight
Puppy-Dog Eyes in Wild Canines Sparks Rethink on Dog Evolution
The eyebrows of the African wild dog have scientists wondering whether other canine species besides domestic dogs can make the irresistible “puppy-dog eyes” expression
Boeing's Starliner launch will be the 1st astronaut flight on an Atlas V rocket. How did NASA and ULA get it ready for crews? (exclusive)
Sun unleashes X-class solar flare, radio blackouts reported (video)
The ISS may be more visible in the night sky throughout May. Here's how to see it
Ball-balancing robot could assist wheelchair users
Ball-balancing robot could assist wheelchair users
1st woman to command a US spacecraft Eileen Collins 'signs' patch to inspire girls
New NASA Black Hole Visualization Takes Viewers Beyond the Brink
5 min read
New NASA Black Hole Visualization Takes Viewers Beyond the BrinkEver wonder what happens when you fall into a black hole? Now, thanks to a new, immersive visualization produced on a NASA supercomputer, viewers can plunge into the event horizon, a black hole’s point of no return.
In this visualization of a flight toward a supermassive black hole, labels highlight many of the fascinating features produced by the effects of general relativity along the way. Produced on a NASA supercomputer, the simulation tracks a camera as it approaches, briefly orbits, and then crosses the event horizon — the point of no return — of a monster black hole much like the one at the center of our galaxy. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/J. Schnittman and B. PowellView the plunge in 360 video on YouTube
“People often ask about this, and simulating these difficult-to-imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity to actual consequences in the real universe,” said Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who created the visualizations. “So I simulated two different scenarios, one where a camera — a stand-in for a daring astronaut — just misses the event horizon and slingshots back out, and one where it crosses the boundary, sealing its fate.”
The visualizations are available in multiple forms. Explainer videos act as sightseeing guides, illuminating the bizarre effects of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Versions rendered as 360-degree videos let viewers look all around during the trip, while others play as flat all-sky maps.
To create the visualizations, Schnittman teamed up with fellow Goddard scientist Brian Powell and used the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation. The project generated about 10 terabytes of data — equivalent to roughly half of the estimated text content in the Library of Congress — and took about 5 days running on just 0.3% of Discover’s 129,000 processors. The same feat would take more than a decade on a typical laptop.
The destination is a supermassive black hole with 4.3 million times the mass of our Sun, equivalent to the monster located at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
“If you have the choice, you want to fall into a supermassive black hole,” Schnittman explained. “Stellar-mass black holes, which contain up to about 30 solar masses, possess much smaller event horizons and stronger tidal forces, which can rip apart approaching objects before they get to the horizon.”
This occurs because the gravitational pull on the end of an object nearer the black hole is much stronger than that on the other end. Infalling objects stretch out like noodles, a process astrophysicists call spaghettification.
The simulated black hole’s event horizon spans about 16 million miles (25 million kilometers), or about 17% of the distance from Earth to the Sun. A flat, swirling cloud of hot, glowing gas called an accretion disk surrounds it and serves as a visual reference during the fall. So do glowing structures called photon rings, which form closer to the black hole from light that has orbited it one or more times. A backdrop of the starry sky as seen from Earth completes the scene.
Tour an alternative visualization that tracks a camera as it approaches, falls toward, briefly orbits, and escapes a supermassive black hole. This immersive 360-degree version allows viewers to look around during the flight. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/J. Schnittman and B. PowellView the flyby explainer on YouTube
As the camera approaches the black hole, reaching speeds ever closer to that of light itself, the glow from the accretion disk and background stars becomes amplified in much the same way as the sound of an oncoming racecar rises in pitch. Their light appears brighter and whiter when looking into the direction of travel.
The movies begin with the camera located nearly 400 million miles (640 million kilometers) away, with the black hole quickly filling the view. Along the way, the black hole’s disk, photon rings, and the night sky become increasingly distorted — and even form multiple images as their light traverses the increasingly warped space-time.
In real time, the camera takes about 3 hours to fall to the event horizon, executing almost two complete 30-minute orbits along the way. But to anyone observing from afar, it would never quite get there. As space-time becomes ever more distorted closer to the horizon, the image of the camera would slow and then seem to freeze just shy of it. This is why astronomers originally referred to black holes as “frozen stars.”
At the event horizon, even space-time itself flows inward at the speed of light, the cosmic speed limit. Once inside it, both the camera and the space-time in which it’s moving rush toward the black hole’s center — a one-dimensional point called a singularity, where the laws of physics as we know them cease to operate.
“Once the camera crosses the horizon, its destruction by spaghettification is just 12.8 seconds away,” Schnittman said. From there, it’s only 79,500 miles (128,000 kilometers) to the singularity. This final leg of the voyage is over in the blink of an eye.
In the alternative scenario, the camera orbits close to the event horizon but it never crosses over and escapes to safety. If an astronaut flew a spacecraft on this 6-hour round trip while her colleagues on a mothership remained far from the black hole, she’d return 36 minutes younger than her colleagues. That’s because time passes more slowly near a strong gravitational source and when moving near the speed of light.
“This situation can be even more extreme,” Schnittman noted. “If the black hole were rapidly rotating, like the one shown in the 2014 movie ‘Interstellar,’ she would return many years younger than her shipmates.”
Download high-resolution video and images from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio
By Francis Reddy
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli
301-286-1940
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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A Different Perspective – Remembering James Dean, Founder of the NASA Art Program
In March 1962, NASA Administrator James Webb addressed a two-paragraph memorandum to NASA Public Affairs Director Hiden T. Cox about the possibility of bringing in artists to highlight the agency’s achievements in a new way. In it, he wrote, “We should consider in a deliberate way just what NASA should do in the field of fine arts to commemorate the … historic events” of America’s initial steps into space.
Shortly thereafter, NASA employee and artist James Dean was tasked with implementing NASA’s brand-new art program. Working alongside National Art Gallery Curator of Painting H. Lester Cooke, he created a framework to give artists unparalleled access to NASA missions at every step along the way, such as suit-up, launch and landing activities, and meetings with scientists and astronauts.
“It’s amazing just how good a sketch pad is at getting you into places,” Dean said in a 2008 oral history interview. “People shy away from cameras, but sketch pads, pencils, paints, you know … a lot of doors got opened that you could never open by making an official request.”
Walt Owen, “Apollo 15 NASA Artist at Work, VAB,” 1971, watercolor on paper. The painting depicts an artist seated on the ground inside the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB). Walt Owen / Courtesy of the Smithsonian National Air and Space MuseumThe NASA Art Program selected an initial group of eight artists – Peter Hurd, George Weymouth, Paul Calle, Robert McCall, Robert Shore, Lamar Dodd, John McCoy, and Mitchell Jamieson – in May 1963 to capture their interpretations of the final flight of the Mercury program, Faith 7. Seven of these men spent their time exploring Cape Canaveral and covering prelaunch activities; Jamieson covered splashdown and landing by being assigned to one of the recovery ships.
Though the grants and honorariums associated with being a NASA Art Program participant were always nominal – $800 in the 1960s and up to $3,000 in the early 2000s – many other well-known artists continued to work with the program through the decades that followed, including Norman Rockwell, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Annie Leibowitz, and Chakaia Booker.
“It wasn’t money they were after,” Dean noted. “They were interested in the experience and being invited back into where history was being made. I mean, artists have been with explorers … [since] the early days of exploration in this country.”
James Browning Wyeth, “Support,” 1965, watercolor on paper. The painting depicts the Gemini IV launch from the viewpoint of a neighboring gantry to the Gemini Launch Complex 19.James Browning Wyeth / Courtesy of the Smithsonian National Air and Space MuseumDean also recognized the importance of having a diverse range of artists present, even if they were all ostensibly there to capture the same historical event. “When you have six artists sitting together painting the same thing,” he explained, “each painting is different. And that’s because … they’re seeing all the same thing, but the image goes through their imagination too and all their experience.”
While there were some initial concerns about the NASA engineers and scientists accepting the artists as a new, prolonged presence in their midst, Dean found that once they “let the artist in and see what they were doing, they really hit it off because the engineers and the scientists and the artists really use a lot of imagination. So they were really connecting on a certain level.” He also observed a unique symbiosis occurring between artist and worker: “When an artist … turns your workplace into a work of art, you know, it validates everything you’ve been doing. It is a real motivating factor to see something like that.”
Artist James Dean, using a makeshift easel for support, prepares a preliminary study of the space shuttle Columbia on the pad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on June 27, 1982, as the spacecraft is prepared for its fourth flight (STS-4).NASADean served as the director of the NASA Art Program from 1962 to 1974, before leaving to become the first art curator for the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum from 1974 until his retirement in 1980. He passed away in Washington on March 22, 2024, at the age of 92. But his legacy lives on in the NASA Art Program collection, which currently has some 3,000 works divided between the National Air and Space Museum and NASA. Today, the program is focused on STEM outreach initiatives to inspire youth through creative activity.
To learn more, check out selected works from the NASA Art Program on the NASA History Flickr page and the National Air and Space Museum page.
Tech Today: NASA’s Ion Thruster Knowhow Keeps Satellites Flying
2 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) This Hall-effect thruster, shown being tested at Glenn Research Center, turns electricity and inert gas into force that could propel a spacecraft. Orbion Space Technology was founded to bring the high efficiency of these thrusters to small commercial satellites, and the company sought the center’s help to make that a reality.Credit: NASAIn low Earth orbit, satellites face a constant challenge – a tiny amount of atmospheric drag that, over time, causes them to slow down and decay their orbit. To combat this, spacecraft rely on in-space thrusters to adjust positioning and boost orbits. However, most of these thrusters use heavy, expensive chemical propellants. This is where the game-changing ion thrusters come in, offering a more efficient and cost-effective solution for satellite operations.
Orbion Space Technology, based in Houghton, Michigan, was established in 2016. Recognizing a market need, the company set out to find innovative ways to either extend the lifespan of satellites in orbit or increase their payload capacity. This ambitious goal necessitated the development of a thruster that could operate efficiently with minimal fuel consumption, leading to the creation of the company’s Aurora thruster.
Hall-effect thrusters, an advanced ion propulsion technology, use electricity rather than chemical reactions to propel spacecraft. Orbion’s founders saw the technology grow from an experimental concept to being regularly used on missions across the solar system. Still, the company had to turn to the experts to make these thrusters viable for satellite operators.
Orbion’s Aurora thrusters are small and efficient yet powerful enough to maintain the orbits of small satellites for several years.Credit: Orbion Space Technology Inc.NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland leads the development of ion thrusters for the agency, designing and evaluating thrusters for missions like Dawn and DART and the agency’s Gateway lunar space station. Orbion entered into a Data Usage Agreement with NASA Glenn to receive detailed information from the development of these engines and a non-exclusive evaluation license. One of the reasons Orbion turned to NASA was its advancements in materials research for ion thrusters and the Glenn-developed cathode heater, which improves electrical efficiency and operating life.
This work resulted in Orbion’s Aurora thrusters being just as capable as those that NASA builds for its deep space science and exploration missions. Orbion has since sold several Aurora thrusters to government and private sector companies, including a recent contract with a large commercial satellite operator for its new constellation of Earth-observing spacecraft.
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Sols 4175-4177: Don’t Blink We’re Taking a Picture
3 min read
Sols 4175-4177: Don’t Blink We’re Taking a Picture This image shows our previous workspace block and rover wheel tracks from Sol 4171 taken by the Left Navigation Camera onboard NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity. NASA/JPL-CaltechEarth planning date: Friday, May 3, 2024
Curiosity loves to drive so it’s pretty rare we stay at a location longer than one planning cycle without the intention of drilling. But since we found ourselves at this unique and beautiful rubbly ridge with dark-toned clasts all around, the science team decided to skip driving last plan and stay through most of the weekend in favor of more contact science. My job this week was operating the Mastcams, and we decided to take full advantage of this opportunity! Why not take an afternoon 360-degree panorama while we’re here? It’s understandably hard to argue against a full panorama, so we went for it and planned 331 Mastcam Left images that should cover most of the terrain around us (including a custom arm pose to get the ridge in better view). Since our left filter wheel got stuck last fall, occluding over half of our lens, we’ve had to subframe our images quite a bit to avoid any filter wheel hardware showing up and thus — our Mastcam Left frame size covers less than half what it use to. It’s extremely lucky we’re still able to use the camera at all, and we’re very happy to keep planning 360 panos after all these years even if it takes about 2.5x more images to acquire.
Now for the reason we stayed: a full evening of contact science on the first sol! APXS and MAHLI are planning to investigate a light-toned, layered but somehow still crunchy, rock named “Liberty Cap” and another similar rock named “Wilma Lake.” Liberty Cap imaging will also include a different type of MAHLI stereo where the turret rotates instead of moves laterally, called “rotational” stereo (or: “Herkenhoff” stereo after Ken Herkenhoff, a long-time MAHLI Co-Investigator among many other titles). Without any APXS support, MAHLI will also take a look at a pointy, dark-toned target named “Lookout Peak.” I sit right next to the MAHLI operations team and was trying my best to keep up with all they have going on today.
On the second sol, we drive! To be honest, there’s a ton more we planned today (including mid-drive and post-drive Mastcam imaging!) but this blog could go on and on with how packed this plan is. It’s always a little nerve-wracking sending a plan like this up to Mars before checking out for the weekend, but I’ll try my best and come back fresh for more Mastcam imaging on Monday.
Written by Natalie Moore, Mission Operations Specialist at Malin Space Science Systems
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