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Endurance sank beneath the ice during Ernest Shackleton’s legendary Antarctic expedition. More than a hundred years later, researchers document their own saga of how they found the vessel

Endurance sank beneath the ice during Ernest Shackleton’s legendary Antarctic expedition. More than a hundred years later, researchers document their own saga of how they found the vessel

Forget Armageddon-sized rocks, just one of 25,000 smaller asteroids could destroy a city on Earth. How to Kill an Asteroid by Robin George Andrew shows how science plans to save the planet

Forget Armageddon-sized rocks, just one of 25,000 smaller asteroids could destroy a city on Earth. How to Kill an Asteroid by Robin George Andrew shows how science plans to save the planet

I have a confession to make. After taking a handful of autonomous taxi rides, I have gone from a hater to a friend of robot cars in just a few weeks, says Annalee Newitz

Feedback digs into a baffling ad for a mobile game and identifies a new and devilish way to advertise a product online: make it as confusing as possible to encourage people to click (it worked on Feedback)

Thanks to artificial intelligence, understanding animals may be closer than we think. But we may not like what they are going to tell us, says RSPCA chief executive Chris Sherwood

Orca – Black & White Gold digs deep into the dirty waters surrounding the killer whale trade and captures a daring rescue mission

I have a confession to make. After taking a handful of autonomous taxi rides, I have gone from a hater to a friend of robot cars in just a few weeks, says Annalee Newitz

Feedback digs into a baffling ad for a mobile game and identifies a new and devilish way to advertise a product online: make it as confusing as possible to encourage people to click (it worked on Feedback)

Thanks to artificial intelligence, understanding animals may be closer than we think. But we may not like what they are going to tell us, says RSPCA chief executive Chris Sherwood

Orca – Black & White Gold digs deep into the dirty waters surrounding the killer whale trade and captures a daring rescue mission

From the benefits of fermented foods to diets that promise a better hormone balance, there is a confusing array of dietary advice out there

NASA has refined its list of potential landing sites near the moon's south pole for its Artemis 3 mission, which aims to return astronauts to the lunar surface no earlier than 2026.

From the benefits of fermented foods to diets that promise a better hormone balance, there is a confusing array of dietary advice out there

NASA test pilot Joe Walker took the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV) for its first spin 60 years ago today. NASA used the LLRV, also known as the flying bedstead, to train Apollo astronauts for the descent to the Moon's surface.

NASA

NASA pilot Joe Walker sits in the pilot’s platform of the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV) number 1 on Oct. 30, 1964. The LLRV and its successor the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle (LLTV) provided the training tool to simulate the final 200 feet of the descent to the Moon’s surface.

The LLRVs, humorously referred to as flying bedsteads, were used by NASA’s Flight Research Center, now NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California, to study and analyze piloting techniques needed to fly and land the Apollo lunar module in the moon’s airless environment.

Learn more about the LLRV’s first flight.

Image credit: NASA

NASA's Perseverance rover found strange green spots in Martian rock, potentially indicating a past interaction with liquid water.

4 min read

Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) NASA’s Perseverance rover captured the silhouette of the Martian moon Phobos as it passed in front of the Sun on Sept. 30, 2024. The video shows the transit speeded up by four times, followed by the eclipse in real time. NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS

The tiny, potato-shaped moon Phobos, one of two Martian moons, cast a silhouette as it passed in front of the Sun, creating an eye in Mars’ sky.

From its perch on the western wall of Mars’ Jezero Crater, NASA’s Perseverance rover recently spied a “googly eye” peering down from space. The pupil in this celestial gaze is the Martian moon Phobos, and the iris is our Sun.

Captured by the rover’s Mastcam-Z on Sept. 30, the 1,285th Martian day of Perseverance’s mission, the event took place when the potato-shaped moon passed directly between the Sun and a point on the surface of Mars, obscuring a large part of the Sun’s disc. At the same time that Phobos appeared as a large black disc rapidly moving across the face of the Sun, its shadow, or antumbra, moved across the planet’s surface.

Astronomer Asaph Hall named the potato-shaped moon in 1877, after the god of fear and panic in Greek mythology; the word “phobia” comes from Phobos. (And the word for fear of potatoes, and perhaps potato-shaped moons, is potnonomicaphobia.) He named Mars’ other moon Deimos, after Phobos’ mythological twin brother.

Roughly 157 times smaller in diameter than Earth’s Moon, Phobos is only about 17 miles (27 kilometers) at its widest point. Deimos is even smaller.

Rapid Transit

Because Phobos’ orbit is almost perfectly in line with the Martian equator and relatively close to the planet’s surface, transits of the moon occur on most days of the Martian year. Due to its quick orbit (about 7.6 hours to do a full loop around Mars), a transit of Phobos usually lasts only 30 seconds or so.

This is not the first time that a NASA rover has witnessed Phobos blocking the Sun’s rays. Perseverance has captured several Phobos transits since landing at Mars’ Jezero Crater in February 2021. Curiosity captured a video in 2019. And Opportunity captured an image in 2004.

By comparing the various images, scientists can refine their understanding of the moon’s orbit to learn how it’s changing. Phobos is getting closer to Mars and is predicted to collide with it in about 50 million years.

More About Perseverance

Arizona State University leads the operations of the Mastcam-Z instrument, working in collaboration with Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, on the design, fabrication, testing, and operation of the cameras, and in collaboration with the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen on the design, fabrication, and testing of the calibration targets.

A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).

Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed for the agency by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.

For more about Perseverance:

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020

News Media Contacts

Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov

DC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-9011
agle@jpl.nasa.gov

2024-150

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Details Last Updated Oct 30, 2024 Related Terms

• Perseverance (Rover)
• Astrobiology
• Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• Mars
• Mars 2020

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NASA to Launch Innovative Solar Coronagraph to Space Station

NASA’s Coronal Diagnostic Experiment (CODEX) is ready to launch to the International Space Station to reveal new details about the solar wind including its origin and its evolution.

Launching in November 2024 aboard SpaceX’s 31st commercial resupply services mission, CODEX will be robotically installed on the exterior of the space station. As a solar coronagraph, CODEX will block out the bright light from the Sun’s surface to better see details in the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona.

In this animation, the CODEX instrument can be seen mounted on the exterior of the International Space Station. For more CODEX imagery, visit https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14647. CODEX Team/NASA

“The CODEX instrument is a new generation solar coronagraph,” said Jeffrey Newmark, principal investigator for the instrument and scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It has a dual use — it’s both a technology demonstration and will conduct science.”

This coronagraph is different from prior coronagraphs that NASA has used because it has special filters that can provide details of the temperature and speed of the solar wind. Typically, a solar coronagraph captures images of the density of the plasma flowing away from the Sun. By combining the temperature and speed of the solar wind with the traditional density measurement, CODEX can give scientists a fuller picture of the wind itself.

“This isn’t just a snapshot,” said Nicholeen Viall, co-investigator of CODEX and heliophysicist at NASA Goddard. “You’re going to get to see the evolution of structures in the solar wind, from when they form from the Sun’s corona until they flow outwards and become the solar wind.”

The CODEX instrument will give scientists more information to understand what heats the solar wind to around 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit — around 175 times hotter than the Sun’s surface — and sends it streaming out from the Sun at almost a million miles per hour.

Team members for CODEX pose with the instrument in a clean facility during initial integration of the coronagraph with the pointing system. CODEX Team/NASA

This launch is just the latest step in a long history for the instrument. In the early 2000s and in August 2017, NASA scientists ran ground-based experiments similar to CODEX during total solar eclipses. A coronagraph mimics what happens during a total solar eclipse, so this naturally occurring phenomena provided a good opportunity to test instruments that measure the temperature and speed of the solar wind.

In 2019, NASA scientists launched the Balloon-borne Investigation of Temperature and Speed of Electrons in the corona (BITSE) experiment. A balloon the size of a football field carried the CODEX prototype 22 miles above Earth’s surface, where the atmosphere is much thinner and the sky is dimmer than it is from the ground, enabling better observations. However, this region of Earth’s atmosphere is still brighter than outer space itself.

“We saw enough from BITSE to see that the technique worked, but not enough to achieve the long-term science objectives,” said Newmark.

Now, by installing CODEX on the space station, scientists will be able to view the Sun’s corona without fighting the brightness of Earth’s atmosphere. This is also a beneficial time for the instrument to launch because the Sun has reached its solar maximum phase, a period of high activity during its 11-year cycle.

“The types of solar wind that we get during solar maximum are different than some of the types of wind we get during solar minimum,” said Viall. “There are different coronal structures during this time that lead to different types of solar wind.”

The CODEX coronagraph is shown during optical alignment and assembly. CODEX Team/NASA

This coronagraph will be looking at two types of solar wind. In one, the solar wind travels directly outward from our star, pulling the magnetic field from the Sun into the heliosphere, the bubble that surrounds our solar system. The other type of solar wind forms from magnetic field lines that are initially closed, like a loop, but then open up.

These closed field lines contain hot, dense plasma. When the loops open, this hot plasma gets propelled into the solar wind. While these “blobs” of plasma are present throughout all of the solar cycle, scientists expect their location to change because of the magnetic complexity of the corona during solar maximum. The CODEX instrument is designed to see how hot these blobs are for the first time.

The coronagraph will also build upon research from ongoing space missions, such as the joint ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA mission Solar Orbiter, which also carries a coronagraph, and NASA’s Parker Solar Probe. For example, CODEX will look at the solar wind much closer to the solar surface, while Parker Solar Probe samples it a little farther out. Launching in 2025, NASA’s Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission will make 3D observations of the Sun’s corona to learn how the mass and energy there become solar wind.

By comparing these findings, scientists can better understand how the solar wind is formed and how the solar wind changes as it travels farther from the Sun. This research advances our understanding of space weather, the conditions in space that may interact with Earth and spacecraft.

“Just like understanding hurricanes, you want to understand the atmosphere the storm is flowing through,” said Newmark. “CODEX’s observations will contribute to our understanding of the region that space weather travels through, helping improve predictions.”

The CODEX instrument is a collaboration between NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute with additional contribution from Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics.

By Abbey Interrante
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

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Details

Last Updated

Oct 30, 2024

Related Terms

• Coronal Diagnostic Experiment (CODEX)
• Goddard Space Flight Center
• Heliophysics
• Heliophysics Division
• International Space Station (ISS)
• Science Mission Directorate
• Solar Wind
• Space Weather
• The Sun
• The Sun & Solar Physics

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