From NASA JPL marking the passage of the twin Voyager spacecraft beyond our solar system. We knew we were on a journey of discovery when we launched the Voyager spacecraft, but we had no idea how much there was to discover.

We had a sense that we knew what it felt like to be Magellan or Columbus.

Time after time we were surprised by seeing things that we had not expected or even imagined. From volcanoes erupting from the moon Io to the possibility of a liquid water ocean under the icy crust of Europa. Titan, where we found an atmosphere. Uranus’ small moon Miranda, which had one of the most complex geologic surfaces we’d seen. Even at Neptune, Triton, 40 degrees above absolute zero, even there there were geysers erupting.

It’s the only spacecraft that’s gone by Uranus. It’s the only spacecraft that’s gone by Neptune. Everything we know about those planets we know from Voyager.

To see those first pictures coming in from the outer solar system, for the first time what had been a point of light in the sky was a place.

I really credit the people that designed the mission, both the engineers and the Continue reading Voyager Humanity’s Farthest Journey →

“The dust cloud around Scheila could be 10,000 times as massive as the one ejected from comet 9P/Tempel 1 during NASA’s UMD-led Deep Impact mission,” said co-author Michael Kelley, also at the University of Maryland. “Collisions allow us to peek inside comets and asteroids. Ejecta kicked up by Deep Impact contained lots of ice, and the absence of ice in Scheila’s interior shows that it’s entirely unlike comets.”

From NASA Astrophysics and the amazings at Goddard Space Flight Center. The famous Crab Nebula supernova remnant has erupted in an enormous flare five times more powerful than any flare previously seen from the object. On April 12, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope first detected the outburst, which lasted six days.

The nebula is the wreckage of an exploded star that emitted light which reached Earth in the year 1054. It is located 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. At the heart of an expanding gas cloud lies what is left of the original star’s core, a superdense neutron star that spins 30 times a second. With each rotation, the star swings intense beams of radiation toward Earth, creating the pulsed emission characteristic of spinning neutron stars (also known as pulsars).

Apart from these pulses, astrophysicists believed the Crab Nebula was a virtually constant source of high-energy radiation. But in January, scientists associated with several orbiting observatories, including NASA’s Fermi, Swift and Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, reported long-term brightness changes at X-ray energies.

“The Crab Nebula hosts high-energy variability that we’re only now fully appreciating,” said Rolf Buehler, a member of the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) team at the Continue reading Flare States of the Crab Nebula →

An intimate tour of Earth’s most impressive landscapes… as captured by astronauts with their digital cameras. Dr. Justin Wilkinson from NASA’s astronaut team describes the special places that spacemen focus on whenever they get a moment.

We start with the coast of Namibia in southwestern Africa, the very dry desert coast of the Namib Desert. You can see a cloud band butting up against the shore and some straight sand dunes in the lower left of the picture. Yeah those are big red sand dunes that the astronauts say is one of the most beautiful sites that you can get when you’re flying.

Coming into the view on the left is an impact crater right in the middle of the picture, right about now and some wind streaks. We know where this area is because it’s a bit unique. We’ve got a major dune field coming into the picture on the left there: the Oriental Sand Sea, as it’s called in French, and on the top is the Isawan Sand Sea.

This is the island of Sicily with cloud over Mt. Etna, so you can’t quite tell there’s a big volcano in the middle of the picture right now. And there’s Continue reading What an Astronaut’s Camera Sees: International Space Station →

NASA video narrated by William Shatner, the HD 720p version. An idea born in unsettled times becomes a feat of engineering excellence, the most complex machine ever built, to bring humans to and from space and eventually construct the next stop on the road to space exploration.

From NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Scientists have spotted the iconic surfer’s wave rolling through the atmosphere of the sun. This makes for more than just a nice photo-op: the waves hold clues as to how energy moves through that atmosphere, known as the corona.

Since scientists know how these kinds of waves — initiated by a Kelvin-Helmholtz instability if you’re being technical — disperse energy in the water, they can use this information to better understand the corona. This in turn, may help solve an enduring mystery of why the corona is thousands of times hotter than originally expected.

Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities occur when two fluids of different densities or different speeds flow by each other. In the case of ocean waves, that’s the dense water and the lighter air. As they flow past each other, slight ripples can be quickly amplified into the giant waves loved by surfers. In the case of the solar atmosphere, which is made of a very hot and electrically charged gas called plasma, the two flows come from an expanse of plasma erupting off the sun’s surface as it passes by plasma that is not erupting. The difference in flow speeds and densities across this boundary Continue reading Catching Solar Waves →

A gem from NASA Heliophysics and the Science Visualization Studio. The sun’s magnetic field spins opposite directions on the north and south poles. These oppositely pointing magnetic fields are separated by a layer of current called the heliospheric current sheet. Due to the tilt of the magnetic axis in relation to the axis of rotation of the Sun, the heliospheric current sheet flaps like a flag in the wind. The flapping current sheet separates regions of oppositely pointing magnetic field, called sectors. As the solar wind speed decreases past the termination shock, the sectors squeeze together, bringing regions of opposite magnetic field closer to each other. The Voyager spacecraft have now found that when the separation of sectors becomes very small, the sectored magnetic field breaks up into a sea of nested “magnetic bubbles” in a phenomenon called magnetic reconnection. The region of nested bubbles is carried by the solar wind to the north and south filling out the entire front region of the heliopause and the sector region in the heliosheath.
This discovery has prompted a complete revision of what the heliosheath region looks like. The smooth, streamlined look is gone, replaced with a bubbly, frothy outer layer.

From HubbleCast and Dr. J. The Hubble Space Telescope has produced a close-up view of the galaxy Centaurus A. Hubble’s multi-wavelength image is the most detailed ever made of this dynamic and dusty galaxy.

Centaurus A is well known for its huge dust lanes that stretch across the entire extent of the galaxy. Hubble’s new observations are an extreme close-up of a small part of these dust lanes. This new image is made from observations in ultraviolet, optical and near- infrared light. The utraviolet light shows us the location of hot young stars, whereas the near infrared light allows us to glimpse some of the details that are obscured by dust in the optical.

Astronomers think that Centaurus A must have collided and merged with another galaxy at some point in the past. The shockwaves of this event caused hydrogen gas to coalesce and sparked intense areas of star formation, as seen in the red patches visible here. The turmoil of this collision also explains the warped shape of the galaxy’s disc.

Looking at a broader view taken by ESO’s Wide Field Imager reveals the extent of the distortion in Cen A’s shape, as well as further areas of vigorous star formation.

The galaxy Continue reading Warped Galaxy in Turmoil →

From the European Space Agency and the European Southern Observatory. This video explores recent observations of the galaxy cluster Abell 2744, nicknamed Pandora’s Cluster. Scientists have pieced together the cluster’s complex and violent history using telescopes in space and on the ground, including the Hubble Space Telescope and ESO’s Very Large Telescope. Abell 2744 seems to be the result of a simultaneous pile-up of at least four separate galaxy clusters, and this complex collision has produced strange effects that have never been seen together before.

When huge clusters of galaxies crash together, the resulting mess is a treasure trove of information for astronomers. By investigating one of the most complex and unusual colliding clusters in the sky, an international team of astronomers has pieced together the history of a cosmic crash that took place over a period of 350 million years.

Julian Merten, one of the lead scientists for this new study of cluster Abell 2744, explains: “Like a crash investigator piecing together the cause of an accident, we can use observations of these cosmic pile-ups to reconstruct events that happened over a period of hundreds of millions of years. This can reveal how structures form in the Universe, and how different Continue reading Pandora’s Dark Mystery →

Go behind the scenes on the space shuttle Endeavour’s final flight, and the second to the last flight in NASA’s space shuttle program. It’s also the final mission for the legendary shuttle commander, astronaut Mark Kelly, who is now retiring from NASA.

Here’s a little background. Endeavour was the fifth and final NASA space shuttle to be built, a replacement for the lost shuttle Challenger. Since 1992, it has successfully flown 25 missions, playing an instrumental role in servicing the Hubble Space Telescope and in the construction of the International Space Station.

Among Endeavour’s missions was the first to include four spacewalks, and then the first to include five. Its STS-67 mission set a length record almost two full days longer than any shuttle mission before it. Its airlock is the only one to have seen three spacewalkers exit through it for a single spacewalk. And in its cargo bay, the first two pieces of the International Space Station were joined together.

On STS-134, Endeavor delivers a new, cutting edge science experiment to the space station: the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. It’s a state-of-the-art, high energy particle physics experiment built in Geneva by a collaboration of 16 different countries. It will search for Continue reading Behind the Scenes on Endeavour’s Final Flight →