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Sols 4164-4165: What’s Around the Ridge-bend?
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Sols 4164-4165: What’s Around the Ridge-bend? This image was taken by the Left Navigation Camera and looks towards the deposits that make up the bend in Gediz Vallis ridge between “Pinnacle Ridge” and “Fascination Turret”. In the background is the layered stratigraphy that makes up the butte “Texoli”. NASA/JPL-CaltechEarth planning date: Monday, April 22, 2024
Curiosity succeeded on a ~14 m drive along a bend in upper Gediz Vallis ridge (uGVR) to park next to “Pinnacle Ridge,” an outcrop of uGVR to the north. Benefitting from a surplus in power, Curiosity’s already substantial targeted science block was extended to 2 hours. This allowed for the perfect imaging opportunity to look back and investigate the ridge deposits between “Pinnacle Ridge” and “Fascination Turret,” an outcrop of uGVR to the south. In other words, most of the imaging opportunities in this two-sol plan will be spent documenting what’s just around the ridge-bend with a detailed Mastcam stereo-mosaic and two ChemCam Long Distance RMI mosaics.
Today I served as Keeper of the Plan for the Geology and Mineralogy Theme Group, where I was kept busy recording all of the geology related requests from the instrument teams. The first sol involved planning contact science on a nearby dark-toned float block, “Sluggo Pass,” possibly originating from Gediz Vallis ridge. The composition and sedimentary textures of “Sluggo Pass” will be investigated with the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS), a ChemCam passive raster, and the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI). While constraints prevented brushing “Sluggo Pass” with the Dust Removal Tool (DRT), the target appeared to be relatively dust-free. The rest of the science plan on the first sol includes a ChemCam Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) targeting a dark-toned coating on light-toned bedrock, dubbed ‘South Lake,’ and two small Mastcam mosaics on blocks possibly associated with “Pinnacle Ridge.”
After a planned ~31 m drive from our current location, the focus of the second sol of the plan will be on untargeted remote science. This includes one of ChemCam’s automated AEGIS (Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science) activities where geological targets are automatically selected from the rover’s navigation cameras for analysis with ChemCam. Additionally, environmental activities were also planned, including tau observations to assess the amount of dust in the atmosphere and Mastcam deck monitoring activities to assess the amount of dust accumulated on the rover deck.
Written by Amelie Roberts, Graduate Student at Imperial College London
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First NASA Mars Analog Crew Nears End of Mission
The first crew to take part in a yearlong NASA Mars analog mission reached the 300-day mark of its mission on April 20.
The team of four volunteers entered the CHAPEA (Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog) habitat at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on June 25, 2023, and is expected to complete the mission on July 6, 2024.
During their 300 days in the ground-based habitat, the crew engaged in multiple simulated “Marswalks,” grew and harvested several salad crops to occasionally supplement their shelf-stable food, and took part in habitat and equipment maintenance.
NASA is leading a return to the Moon for long-term science and exploration. Through Artemis missions, NASA will land the first woman, first person of color, and first international partner astronaut on the Moon, using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before. Lessons learned on and around the Moon and activities like CHAPEA on the ground will prepare NASA for the next giant leap: sending astronauts to Mars.
A CHAPEA mission 1 crew member performs maintenance on hardware outside of the habitat during a simulated spacewalk in December 2023. NASA/CHAPEA Crew The CHAPEA mission 1 crew celebrates Christmas inside the habitat (from left: Ross Brockwell, Anca Selariu, Nathan Jones, Kelly Haston). NASA/CHAPEA Crew Inside the habitat, the CHAPEA mission 1 crew harvested tomatoes.NASA/CHAPEA Crew Explore More 2 min read First NASA Mars Analog Crew Passes Mission Halfway Mark Article 3 months ago 3 min read NASA Mars Analog Crew to Test Food Systems, Crop Growth Article 9 months ago 1 min read First CHAPEA Crew Begins 378-Day Mission Article 10 months ago
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NASA’s CloudSat Ends Mission Peering Into the Heart of Clouds
Over the course of nearly two decades, its powerful radar provided never-before-seen details of clouds and helped advance global weather and climate predictions.
CloudSat, a NASA mission that peered into hurricanes, tallied global snowfall rates, and achieved other weather and climate firsts, has ended its operations. Originally proposed as a 22-month mission, the spacecraft was recently decommissioned after almost 18 years observing the vertical structure and ice/water content of clouds.
As planned, the spacecraft — having reached the end of its lifespan and no longer able to make regular observations — was lowered into an orbit last month that will result in its eventual disintegration in the atmosphere.
When launched in 2006, the mission’s Cloud Profiling Radar was the first-ever 94 GHz wavelength (W-band) radar to fly in space. A thousand times more sensitive than typical ground-based weather radars, it yielded a new vision of clouds — not as flat images on a screen but as 3D slices of atmosphere bristling with ice and rain.
For the first time, scientists could observe clouds and precipitation together, said Graeme Stephens, the mission’s principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “Without clouds, humans wouldn’t exist, because they provide the freshwater that life as we know it requires,” he said. “We sometimes refer to them as clever little devils because of their confounding properties. Clouds have been an enigma in terms of predicting climate change.”
NASA’s CloudSat passed over Hurricane Bill near the U.S. East Coast in August 2009, capturing data from the Category 4 storm’s eye. This pair of images shows a view from the agency’s Aqua satellite (top) along with the vertical structure of the clouds measured by CloudSat’s radar (bottom).Jesse Allen, NASA Earth Observatory
Clouds have long held many secrets. Before CloudSat, we didn’t know how often clouds produce rain and snow on a global basis. Since its launch, we’ve also come a long way in understanding how clouds are able to cool and heat the atmosphere and surface, as well as how they can cause aircraft icing.
CloudSat data has informed thousands of research publications and continues to help scientists make key discoveries, including how much ice and water clouds contain globally and how, by trapping heat in the atmosphere, clouds accelerate the melting of ice in Greenland and at the poles.
Weathering the StormOver the years, CloudSat flew over powerful storm systems with names like Maria, Harvey, and Sandy, peeking beneath their swirling canopies of cirrus clouds. Its Cloud Profiling Radar excelled at penetrating cloud layers to help scientists explore how and why tropical cyclones intensify.
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In this animation, CloudSat’s radar slices into Hurricane Maria as it rapidly intensifies in the Atlantic Ocean in September 2017. Areas of high reflectivity, shown in red and pink, extend above 9 miles (15 kilometers) in height, indicating large amounts of water being drawn upward high into the atmosphere. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/CIRAAcross the life of CloudSat, several potentially mission-ending issues occurred related to the spacecraft’s battery and to the reaction wheels used to control the satellite’s orientation. The CloudSat team developed unique solutions, including “hibernating” the spacecraft during nondaylight portions of each orbit to conserve power, and orienting it with fewer reaction wheels. Their solutions allowed operations to continue until the Cloud Profiling Radar was permanently turned off in December 2023.
“It’s part of who we are as a NASA family that we have dedicated and talented teams that can do things that have never before been done,” said Deborah Vane, CloudSat’s project manager at JPL. “We recovered from these anomalies with techniques that no one has ever used before.”
Sister SatellitesCloudSat was launched on April 28, 2006, in tandem with a lidar-carrying satellite called CALIPSO (short for the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation). The two spacecraft joined an international constellation of weather- and climate-tracking satellites in Earth orbit.
Radar and lidar are considered “active” sensors because they direct beams of energy at Earth — radio waves in the case of CloudSat and laser light in the case of CALIPSO — and measure how the beams reflect off the clouds and fine particles (aerosols) in the atmosphere. Other orbiting science instruments use “passive” sensors that measure reflected sunlight or radiation emitted from Earth or clouds.
Orbiting less than a minute apart, CloudSat and CALIPSO circled the globe in Sun-synchronous orbits from the North to the South Pole, crossing the equator in the early afternoon and after midnight every day. Their overlapping radar-lidar footprint cut through the vertical structure of the atmosphere to study thin and thick clouds, as well as the layers of airborne particles such as dust, sea salt, ash, and soot that can influence cloud formation.
The influence of aerosols on clouds remains a key question for global warming projections. To explore this and other questions, the recently launched PACE satellite and future missions in NASA’s Earth System Observatory will build upon CloudSat’s and CALIPSO’s legacies for a new generation.
“Earth in 2030 will be different than Earth in 2000,” Stephens said. “The world has changed, and the climate has changed. Continuing these measurements will give us new insights into changing weather patterns.”
More About the MissionsThe CloudSat Project is managed for NASA by JPL. JPL developed the Cloud Profiling Radar instrument with important hardware contributions from the Canadian Space Agency. Colorado State University provides science data processing and distribution. BAE Systems of Broomfield, Colorado, designed and built the spacecraft. The U.S. Space Force and U.S. Department of Energy contributed resources. U.S. and international universities and research centers support the mission science team. Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages JPL for NASA.
CALIPSO, which was a joint mission between NASA and the French space agency, CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales), ended its mission in August 2023.
News Media ContactsJane J. Lee / Andrew Wang
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-0307 / 626-379-6874
jane.j.lee@jpl.nasa.gov / andrew.wang@jpl.nasa.gov
Written by Sally Younger
2024-048
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Article 4 days ago 4 min read Students Celebrate Rockets, Environment at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Article 4 days agoHubble Spots the Little Dumbbell Nebula
To celebrate the 34th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope’s launch, the telescope captured an image of the Little Dumbbell Nebula, or M76. M76 is a planetary nebula, an expanding shell of glowing gases that were ejected from a dying red giant star that eventually collapses to an ultra-dense and hot white dwarf. It gets its descriptive name from its shape: a ring, seen edge-on as the central bar structure, and two lobes on either opening of the ring.
Since its launch in 1990 Hubble has made 1.6 million observations of over 53,000 astronomical objects. Most of Hubble’s discoveries were not anticipated before launch, such as supermassive black holes, the atmospheres of exoplanets, gravitational lensing by dark matter, the presence of dark energy, and the abundance of planet formation among stars.
Learn more about the Little Dumbbell Nebula and Hubble.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI
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Explore the Universe with the First E-Book from NASA’s Fermi
4 min read
Explore the Universe with the First E-Book from NASA’s FermiTo commemorate a milestone anniversary for NASA’s Fermi spacecraft, the mission team has published an e-book called “Our High-Energy Universe: 15 Years with the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.”
Readers can download the e-book in PDF and EPUB formats. The e-book is aimed at general audiences with an interest in space.
Cover for the e-book “Our High-Energy Universe: 15 Years with the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.” NASA PDFApr 22, 2024
PDF (44.03 MB)
EPUB
Apr 22, 2024
EPUB+ZIP (804.49 MB)
Launched on June 11, 2008, Fermi detects gamma rays, the highest-energy form of light, from Earth’s atmosphere to far-flung galaxies and cosmic phenomena in between. Its research has uncovered details on topics ranging from solar flares to star formation and the mysteries at the center of our Milky Way.
Through images, fun facts, and launch-day memories, the e-book tells Fermi’s story from conceptualization to launch and recounts some of the mission’s groundbreaking discoveries. By delving into high-energy astrophysics topics like gamma-ray bursts and blazars, readers can explore Fermi’s universe and what questions remain open for investigation in its next chapter.
Fermi was originally called the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope but was renamed after Italian physicist Enrico Fermi in August 2008.
“Enrico Fermi’s science has been important for understanding the sources that the Fermi telescope sees,” said Elizabeth Hays, the mission’s project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “The gamma-ray sky is powered by particle acceleration mechanisms he theorized about.”
The satellite has two gamma-ray detectors: the Large Area Telescope (LAT) and the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM).
The LAT observes a fifth of the gamma-ray sky at any time, detecting high-energy light with energies ranging from 20 million to over 300 billion electron volts. (The energy of visible light is 2 to 3 electron volts.) The GBM views about 70% of the sky at a time at lower energies, searching for brief flashes of gamma-ray light.
The result of this carefully crafted duo is the most sensitive gamma-ray observatory in orbit, equipped to study the universe’s highest-energy phenomena near and far.
By peering through Fermi’s gamma-ray eyes, we can better understand our solar system. Within its first eight years of operation, Fermi detected gamma-ray emissions from 40 solar flares — bursts of energy from the Sun. Some even originated on the Sun’s far side, allowing scientists to analyze how charged particles fired by solar flares can arc from one side of the Sun to produce gamma rays on the other.
In studying our Milky Way, Fermi found two lobes of high-energy gamma rays — called the Fermi Bubbles — extending above and below the galaxy’s center. Each bubble stands 25,000 light-years tall. Astronomers think the bubbles formed following an ancient burst of activity from the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole.
Fermi helps scientists understand black holes in other galaxies, too.
“As a black hole forms, either from the death of a massive star or the collision of two neutron stars, it creates a brief flash of light called a gamma-ray burst,” said Judith Racusin, Fermi’s deputy project scientist at Goddard. “Fermi detects about one burst a day and has helped revolutionize our understanding of these phenomena.”
Even after 15 years of accomplishments, however, many mysteries remain for Fermi to tackle. One of the telescope’s ongoing objectives is to study the composition of dark matter — the mysterious substance that makes up about 25% of the universe.
Because dark matter doesn’t reflect, absorb, or emit light, scientists remain unsure of its composition. One popular theory suggests, though, that dark matter particles create gamma rays when they interact. If Fermi can spot this high-energy signature, it might help scientists learn more about dark matter’s makeup.
If there’s one thing Fermi has taught us, it’s to expect the unexpected. Gamma-ray research has yielded unprecedented breakthroughs in our understanding of the Milky Way’s central black hole, our flaring Sun, and merging neutron stars. As much as we anticipate the next gamma-ray revelation, only time will tell what exactly Fermi has in store.
Fermi is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership managed by Goddard. Fermi was developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the United States.
By Jenna Ahart
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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Hubble Celebrates 34th Anniversary with a Look at the Little Dumbbell Nebula
5 min read
Hubble Celebrates 34th Anniversary with a Look at the Little Dumbbell NebulaIn celebration of the 34th anniversary of the launch of NASA’s legendary Hubble Space Telescope on April 24, astronomers took a snapshot of the Little Dumbbell Nebula (also known as Messier 76, M76, or NGC 650/651) located 3,400 light-years away in the northern circumpolar constellation Perseus. The photogenic nebula is a favorite target of amateur astronomers.
In celebration of the 34th anniversary of the launch of NASA’s legendary Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers took a snapshot of the Little Dumbbell Nebula, also known as Messier 76, or M76, located 3,400 light-years away in the northern circumpolar constellation Perseus. The name ‘Little Dumbbell’ comes from its shape that is a two-lobed structure of colorful, mottled, glowing gases resembling a balloon that’s been pinched around a middle waist. Like an inflating balloon, the lobes are expanding into space from a dying star seen as a white dot in the center. Blistering ultraviolet radiation from the super-hot star is causing the gases to glow. The red color is from nitrogen, and blue is from oxygen. NASA, ESA, STScIDownload this image (3MB)
Download this image (33MB)
M76 is classified as a planetary nebula, an expanding shell of glowing gases that were ejected from a dying red giant star. The star eventually collapses to an ultra-dense and hot white dwarf. A planetary nebula is unrelated to planets, but have that name because astronomers in the 1700s using low-power telescopes thought this type of object resembled a planet.
M76 is composed of a ring, seen edge-on as the central bar structure, and two lobes on either opening of the ring. Before the star burned out, it ejected the ring of gas and dust. The ring was probably sculpted by the effects of the star that once had a binary companion star. This sloughed off material created a thick disk of dust and gas along the plane of the companion’s orbit. The hypothetical companion star isn’t seen in the Hubble image, and so it could have been later swallowed by the central star. The disk would be forensic evidence for that stellar cannibalism.
The primary star is collapsing to form a white dwarf. It is one of the hottest stellar remnants known at a scorching 250,000 degrees Fahrenheit, 24 times our Sun’s surface temperature. The sizzling white dwarf can be seen as a pinpoint in the center of the nebula. A star visible in projection beneath it is not part of the nebula.
Pinched off by the disk, two lobes of hot gas are escaping from the top and bottom of the “belt,” along the star’s rotation axis that is perpendicular to the disk. They are being propelled by the hurricane-like outflow of material from the dying star, tearing across space at two million miles per hour. That’s fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in a little over seven minutes! This torrential “stellar wind” is plowing into cooler, slower-moving gas that was ejected at an earlier stage in the star’s life, when it was a red giant. Ferocious ultraviolet radiation from the super-hot star is causing the gases to glow. The red color is from nitrogen, and blue is from oxygen.
Given our solar system is 4.6 billion years old, the entire nebula is a flash in the pan by cosmological timekeeping. It will vanish in about 15,000 years.
Hubble’s Star Trekking
Since its launch in 1990 Hubble has made 1.6 million observations of over 53,000 astronomical objects. To date, the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland holds 184 terabytes of processed data that is science-ready for astronomers around the world to use for research and analysis. Since 1990, 44,000 science papers have been published from Hubble observations. The space telescope is the most scientifically productive space astrophysics mission in NASA history. The demand for using Hubble is so high it is currently oversubscribed by a factor of six-to-one.
Most of Hubble’s discoveries were not anticipated before launch, such as supermassive black holes, the atmospheres of exoplanets, gravitational lensing by dark matter, the presence of dark energy, and the abundance of planet formation among stars.
Hubble will continue research in those domains and capitalize on its unique ultraviolet-light capability on such topics as solar system phenomena, supernovae outbursts, composition of exoplanet atmospheres, and dynamic emission from galaxies. And Hubble investigations continue to benefit from its long baseline of observations of solar system objects, stellar variable phenomena and other exotic astrophysics of the cosmos.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope was designed to be meant to be complementary to Hubble, and not a substitute. Future Hubble research also will take advantage of the opportunity for synergies with Webb, which observes the universe in infrared light. The combined wavelength coverage of the two space telescopes expands on groundbreaking research in such areas as protostellar disks, exoplanet composition, unusual supernovae, cores of galaxies and chemistry of the distant universe.
Hubble’s Senior Project Scientist Dr. Jennifer Wiseman takes us on a tour of this stunning new image, describes the telescope’s current health, and summarizes some of Hubble’s contributions to astronomy during its 34-year career.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center; Lead Producer: Paul Morris
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.
Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD
Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.
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