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Meet the team behind EarthCARE
As we approach the launch of ESA’s EarthCARE mission, we caught up with some of the scientists, engineers and experts behind the mission.
With the climate crisis increasingly tightening its grip, ESA’s Earth Cloud Aerosol and Radiation Explorer mission (EarthCARE) will shed new light on the complex interactions between clouds, aerosols and radiation in Earth’s atmosphere.
EarthCARE is the largest and most complex Earth Explorer mission. It comes at a critical time in the development of kilometre-scale resolution, global climate models and will provide an important contribution to an improved understanding of cloud convection and its role in Earth’s radiation budget.
EarthCARE is an ESA mission, but it has been developed as a cooperation between ESA and JAXA, the Japanese Space Agency.
This video features interviews with: Pavlos Kollias from Stony Brook University – McGill University, Thorsten Fehr, EarthCARE Mission Scientist at ESA, Robin Hogan, Senior Scientist at ECMWF, Dirk Bernaerts, EarthCARE Project Manager at ESA, Kotska Wallace, Mission and Optical Payload Manager at ESA, Tomomi Nio, EarthCARE Mission Manager at JAXA, Eiichi Tomita, EarthCARE/CPR Project Manager at JAXA, Ulla Wandinger, Senior Scientist at Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research and Bjoern Frommknecht, EarthCARE Mission Manager at ESA.
Follow the EarthCARE launch campaign blog for more updates.
Access the related broadcast quality footage: animations / interviews / satellite stock footage
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Hubble Hunts Visible Light Sources of X-Rays
2 min read
Hubble Hunts Visible Light Sources of X-Rays This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the dwarf galaxy IC 776. ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. SunThis NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the dwarf galaxy IC 776. This swirling collection of new and old stars is located in the constellation Virgo, in the Virgo galaxy cluster, 100 million light-years from Earth. Although IC 776 is a dwarf galaxy, it’s also classified as a SAB-type or ‘weakly barred’ spiral. This highly detailed Hubble view demonstrates that complexity. IC 776 has a ragged, disturbed disc that appears to spiral around the core with arcs of star-forming regions.
The image is from an observation program dedicated to the study of dwarf galaxies in the Virgo cluster that is searching for the visible light emissions from sources of X-rays in these galaxies. X-rays are often emitted by accretion discs, where material that is drawn into a compact object by gravity crashes together and forms a hot, glowing disc. The compact object can be a white dwarf or neutron star in a binary pair that is stealing material from its companion star, or it can be the supermassive black hole at the heart of a galaxy devouring material around it. Dwarf galaxies like IC 776, traveling through the Virgo cluster, experience pressure from intergalactic gas that is similar to the pressure you feel from air hitting your face when you ride a bicycle. This intergalactic gas pressure can both stimulate star formation and feed the central black hole in a galaxy. As more material swirls down toward the black hole, it creates an energetic accretion disc, hot enough to emit X-rays.
While Hubble is not able to see X-rays, it can coordinate with X-ray telescopes such as NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, revealing the sources of this radiation in high resolution using visible light. Dwarf galaxies are very important to our understanding of cosmology and the evolution of galaxies. As with many areas of astronomy, the ability to examine these galaxies across the electromagnetic spectrum is critical to their study.
Text Credit: European Space Agency (ESA)
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Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
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The post This Week's Sky at a Glance, May 3 – 12 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.