Where Will We Land On Mars?

Launch Your Creativity with Space Crafts!

In honor of the completion of our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s spacecraft — the vehicle that will maneuver the observatory to its place in space and enable it to function once there — we’re bringing you a space craft you can complete at home! Join us for a journey across the cosmos, starting right in your own pantry.

Stardust Slime

Ingredients:

1 5 oz. bottle clear glue

½ tablespoon baking soda

Food coloring

1 tablespoon contact lens solution

1 tablespoon glitter

Directions:

Pour the glue into a bowl.

Mix in the baking soda.

Add food coloring (we recommend blue, purple, black, or a combination).

Add contact lens solution and use your hands to work it through the slime. It will initially be very sticky! You can add a little extra contact lens solution to make it firmer and less goopy.

Add glitter a teaspoon at a time, using as much or as little as you like!

Did you know that most of your household ingredients are made of stardust? And so are you! Nearly every naturally occurring element was forged by living or dying stars.

Take the baking soda in this slime recipe, for example. It’s made up of sodium, hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen. The hydrogen was made during the big bang, right at the start of the universe. But the other three elements were created by dying stars. So when you show your friends your space-y slime, you can tell them it’s literally made of stardust!

Still feeling crafty? Try your hand at more pantry projects or these 3D and paper spacecraft models. If you’re eager for a more advanced space craft, check out these embroidery creations for inspiration! Or if you’re ready for a break, take a virtual tour of an interactive version of the Roman Space Telescope here.

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Why are bacteria resistant polymers being experimented, specifically in microgravity?

Juno Spacecraft: What Do We Hope to Learn?

The Juno spacecraft has been traveling toward its destination since its launch in 2011, and is set to insert Jupiter’s orbit on July 4. Jupiter is by far the largest planet in the solar system. Humans have been studying it for hundreds of years, yet still many basic questions about the gas world remain.

The primary goal of the Juno spacecraft is to reveal the story of the formation and evolution of the planet Jupiter. Understanding the origin and evolution of Jupiter can provide the knowledge needed to help us understand the origin of our solar system and planetary systems around other stars.

Have We Visited Jupiter Before? Yes! In 1995, our Galileo mission (artist illustration above) made the voyage to Jupiter. One of its jobs was to drop a probe into Jupiter’s atmosphere. The data showed us that the composition was different than scientists thought, indicating that our theories of planetary formation were wrong.

What’s Different About This Visit? The Juno spacecraft will, for the first time, see below Jupiter’s dense clover of clouds. [Bonus Fact: This is why the mission was named after the Roman goddess, who was Jupiter’s wife, and who could also see through the clouds.]

Unlocking Jupiter’s Secrets

Specifically, Juno will…

Determine how much water is in Jupiter’s atmosphere, which helps determine which planet formation theory is correct (or if new theories are needed)

Look deep into Jupiter’s atmosphere to measure composition, temperature, cloud motions and other properties

Map Jupiter’s magnetic and gravity fields, revealing the planet’s deep structure

Explore and study Jupiter’s magnetosphere near the planet’s poles, especially the auroras – Jupiter’s northern and southern lights – providing new insights about how the planet’s enormous

Juno will let us take a giant step forward in our understanding of how giant planets form and the role these titans played in putting together the rest of the solar system.

For updates on the Juno mission, follow the spacecraft on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Tumblr.

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Hello! I have always wondered about how the clouds work, it seems like they are just gas in the air, but what makes them appear so often? Or how do they form? And how and why do the block out the sun if they're just air?

Thanks to the twin Voyager spacecraft, music is truly universal: Each carries a Golden Record with sights, sounds and songs from Earth as it sails on through the Milky Way. Recalling the classic rock era of the late 1970s when the Voyagers launched, this poster is an homage to the mission’s greatest hits. Some of the most extraordinary discoveries of the probes’ first 40 years include the volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io, the hazy nitrogen atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan and the cold geysers on Neptune’s moon Triton. Voyager 1 is also the first spacecraft to deliver a portrait of our planets from beyond Neptune, depicting Earth as a ‘pale blue dot,’ as of Aug. 25, 2012, to enter interstellar space. Voyager 2 is expected to enter interstellar space in the coming years. Even after 40 years, the Voyagers’ hits just keep on coming.  

Enjoy this and other Voyager anniversary posters. Download them for free here: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/downloads/

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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When Dead Stars Collide!

Gravity has been making waves - literally.  Earlier this month, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for the first direct detection of gravitational waves two years ago. But astronomers just announced another huge advance in the field of gravitational waves - for the first time, we’ve observed light and gravitational waves from the same source.

There was a pair of orbiting neutron stars in a galaxy (called NGC 4993). Neutron stars are the crushed leftover cores of massive stars (stars more than 8 times the mass of our sun) that long ago exploded as supernovas. There are many such pairs of binaries in this galaxy, and in all the galaxies we can see, but something special was about to happen to this particular pair.

Each time these neutron stars orbited, they would lose a teeny bit of gravitational energy to gravitational waves. Gravitational waves are disturbances in space-time - the very fabric of the universe - that travel at the speed of light. The waves are emitted by any mass that is changing speed or direction, like this pair of orbiting neutron stars. However, the gravitational waves are very faint unless the neutron stars are very close and orbiting around each other very fast.

As luck would have it, the teeny energy loss caused the two neutron stars to get a teeny bit closer to each other and orbit a teeny bit faster.  After hundreds of millions of years, all those teeny bits added up, and the neutron stars were *very* close. So close that … BOOM! … they collided. And we witnessed it on Earth on August 17, 2017.  

Credit: National Science Foundation/LIGO/Sonoma State University/A. Simonnet

A couple of very cool things happened in that collision - and we expect they happen in all such neutron star collisions. Just before the neutron stars collided, the gravitational waves were strong enough and at just the right frequency that the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and European Gravitational Observatory’s Virgo could detect them. Just after the collision, those waves quickly faded out because there are no longer two things orbiting around each other!

LIGO is a ground-based detector waiting for gravitational waves to pass through its facilities on Earth. When it is active, it can detect them from almost anywhere in space.

The other thing that happened was what we call a gamma-ray burst. When they get very close, the neutron stars break apart and create a spectacular, but short, explosion. For a couple of seconds, our Fermi Gamma-ray Telescope saw gamma-rays from that explosion. Fermi’s Gamma-ray Burst Monitor is one of our eyes on the sky, looking out for such bursts of gamma-rays that scientists want to catch as soon as they’re happening.

And those gamma-rays came just 1.7 seconds after the gravitational wave signal. The galaxy this occurred in is 130 million light-years away, so the light and gravitational waves were traveling for 130 million years before we detected them.

After that initial burst of gamma-rays, the debris from the explosion continued to glow, fading as it expanded outward. Our Swift, Hubble, Chandra and Spitzer telescopes, along with a number of ground-based observers, were poised to look at this afterglow from the explosion in ultraviolet, optical, X-ray and infrared light. Such coordination between satellites is something that we’ve been doing with our international partners for decades, so we catch events like this one as quickly as possible and in as many wavelengths as possible.

Astronomers have thought that neutron star mergers were the cause of one type of gamma-ray burst - a short gamma-ray burst, like the one they observed on August 17. It wasn’t until we could combine the data from our satellites with the information from LIGO/Virgo that we could confirm this directly.

This event begins a new chapter in astronomy. For centuries, light was the only way we could learn about our universe. Now, we’ve opened up a whole new window into the study of neutron stars and black holes. This means we can see things we could not detect before.

The first LIGO detection was of a pair of merging black holes. Mergers like that may be happening as often as once a month across the universe, but they do not produce much light because there’s little to nothing left around the black hole to emit light. In that case, gravitational waves were the only way to detect the merger.

Image Credit: LIGO/Caltech/MIT/Sonoma State (Aurore Simonnet)

The neutron star merger, though, has plenty of material to emit light. By combining different kinds of light with gravitational waves, we are learning how matter behaves in the most extreme environments. We are learning more about how the gravitational wave information fits with what we already know from light - and in the process we’re solving some long-standing mysteries!

Want to know more? Get more information HERE.

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Spaceships Don’t Go to the Moon Until They’ve Gone Through Ohio

From the South, to the Midwest, to infinity and beyond. The Orion spacecraft for Artemis I has several stops to make before heading out into the expanse, and it can’t go to the Moon until it stops in Ohio. It landed at the Mansfield Lahm Regional Airport on Nov. 24, and then it was transferred to Plum Brook Station where it will undergo a series of environmental tests over the next four months to make sure it’s ready for space. Here are the highlights of its journey so far.

It’s a bird? It’s a whale? It’s the Super Guppy!

The 40-degree-and-extremely-windy weather couldn’t stop the massive crowd at Mansfield from waiting hours to see the Super Guppy land. Families huddled together as they waited, some decked out in NASA gear, including one astronaut costume complete with a helmet. Despite the delays, about 1,500 people held out to watch the bulbous airplane touch down.

Buckle up. It’s time for an extremely safe ride.

After Orion safely made it to Ohio, the next step was transporting it 41 miles to Plum Brook Station. It was loaded onto a massive truck to make the trip, and the drive lasted several hours as it slowly maneuvered the rural route to the facility. The 130-foot, 38-wheel truck hit a peak speed of about 20 miles per hour. It was the largest load ever driven through the state, and more than 700 utility lines were raised or moved in preparation to let the vehicle pass.

Calling us clean freaks would be an understatement.

Any person who even thinks about breathing near Orion has to be suited up. We’re talking “bunny” suit, shoe covers, beard covers, hoods, latex gloves – the works. One of our top priorities is keeping Orion clean during testing to prevent contaminants from sticking to the vehicle’s surface. These substances could cause issues for the capsule during testing and, more importantly, later during its flight around the Moon.

And liftoff of Orion… via crane.

On the ceiling of the Space Environments Complex at Plum Brook Station is a colossal crane used to move large pieces of space hardware into position for testing. It’s an important tool during pretest work, as it is used to lift Orion from the “verticator”—the name we use for the massive contraption used to rotate the vehicle from its laying down position into an upright testing orientation. After liftoff from the verticator, technicians then used the crane to install the spacecraft inside the Heat Flux System for testing.

It’s really not tin foil.

Although it looks like tin foil, the metallic material wrapped around Orion and the Heat Flux System—the bird cage-looking hardware encapsulating the spacecraft—is a material called Mylar. It’s used as a thermal barrier to help control which areas of the spacecraft get heated or cooled during testing. This helps our team avoid wasting energy heating and cooling spots unnecessarily.

Bake at 300° for 63 days.

It took a little over a week to prep Orion for its thermal test in the vacuum chamber. Now begins the 63-day process of heating and cooling (ranging from -250° to 300° Fahrenheit) the capsule to ensure it’s ready to withstand the journey around the Moon and back. 

View more images of Orion’s transportation and preparation here.

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How visible will the stars be compared to a normal night sky if I'm in the path of totality? (Sun completely covered)

I’m not entirely sure, but you will be able to see some stars that you normally wouldn’t see. https://eclipse2017.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Eclipse_brochure-bookmark_508.pdf In fact, during the 1919 eclipse, Sir Arthur Eddington and others used our ability to see stars close to the Sun during the eclipse to help confirm Einstines’ theory of general relativity. https://eclipse2017.nasa.gov/testing-general-relativity

Hot & Steamy RS-25 Engine Test

Today, we tested the RS-25 engine at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, and boy was it hot! Besides the fact that it was a hot day, the 6,000 degree operating temperature of the hot fire test didn’t help things. This engine is one of four that will power the core stage of our Space Launch System (SLS) into deep space and to Mars. Today’s test reached 109% power and burned 150,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and 60,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen. When SLS launches with all 4 of its engines, it will be the most powerful rocket in the world!

This engine was previously used to to fly dozens of successful missions on the space shuttle, so you might be asking, “Why are we spending time testing it again if we already know it’s awesome?” Well, it’s actually really important that we test them specifically for use with SLS for a number of reasons, including the fact that we will be operating at 109% power, vs. the 104% power previously used.

If you missed the 535-second, ground rumbling test today -- you’re in luck. We’ve compiled all the cool stuff (fire, steam & loud noises) into a recap video. Check it out here:

When you're finally up out of the air, high enough to see the Earth, what is it like to see our home planet from above for the first time?