How Exactly Do We Plan To Bring An Asteroid Sample Back To Earth?

Science Balloons on Parade

You might see some of your favorite characters bobbing through the streets of New York City during Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, but did you know that NASA's got some balloons of our own? Early December in Antarctica, we're planning to launch some behemoth balloons carrying science experiments and instruments to help unravel mysteries of our universe. 

Like the parade balloons, these scientific balloons are filled with helium. But the science balloon is designed to soar above 130,000 feet, past the clouding views of our atmosphere. They can stay in the air from 2 hours to 100 days, depending on the balloon type and how heavy the science payload is (up to 6000 lbs). A typical, fully-inflated scientific balloon can be 460 ft in diameter and 396 ft in height, made of acres of sandwich bag-looking film. That’s MUCH larger than some parade balloons, and probably a pain to bring down 6th Avenue.

Like the parade balloons, these scientific balloons are filled with helium. But the science balloon is designed to soar above 130,000 feet, past the clouding views of our atmosphere. 

So why launch these balloons in Antarctica? Winter in the South Pole means 24 hours of non-stop sunlight, which is great for studying our sun. Being at the poles, which has a weaker magnetic field than the rest of our planet, also means we can capture and study cosmic ray particles that would be too scattered by the Earth’s magnetic field elsewhere. Depending on the kind of science we'd like to do, we also launch balloons from places all over the world.

These balloons are great, inexpensive test-beds for scientific instruments that could one day end up on a space-bound mission. NASA's NuSTAR mission started out as a balloon experiment before it was refined and launched into space to study black holes and other supernova remnants. Learn more about our balloons, and see where these balloons are going using our tracker.

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Parade Photo: U.S. Air Force photo/Senior Airman Brian Ferguson

That star stuff you see here? That's what you're made of. You possess the elements ✨ ⁣

This composite image from our Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Isaac Newton Telescope shows high-energy X-rays emitted by young, massive stars in the star cluster Cygnus OB2. This year we're celebrating the 20th anniversary of Chandra's launch. Want to dive deeper? Click here

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New Glovebox Facility Heads to Space for Biological Research

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency H-IIB rocket is zooming toward the International Space Station carrying NASA’s Life Sciences Glovebox, a state-of-the-art microgravity research facility.

JAXA’s HTV3, taken during Expedition 32

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and their partners around the world are excited to initiate new, high-value biological research in low-Earth orbit.

The Japanese rocket, hauling the research facility and other cargo via the HTV-7 transfer vehicle, successfully lifted off at 1:52 p.m. EDT from Tanegashima Space Center off the coast of Japan.

Its launch marks a first for hauling bulky equipment to space. Roughly the size of a large fish tank, the Life Sciences Glovebox comes in at 26 inches high, 35 inches wide and 24 inches deep, with 15 cubic feet of available workspace.

"The Life Sciences Glovebox is on its way to the space station to enable a host of biological and physiological studies, including new research into microgravity's long-term impact on the human body," said Yancy Young, project manager at Marshall. "This versatile facility not only will help us better protect human explorers on long voyages into deep space, but it could aid medical and scientific advances benefiting the whole world."

Boeing engineers at Marshall modified a refrigerator-freezer rack to house the core facility, using state-of-the-art, 3D-printing technology to custom design key pieces of the rack to secure the unit in its protective foam clamshell.

NASA is now determining the roster of science investigations lined up to make use of the facility, beginning as early as late 2018. "We've already got more than a dozen glovebox experiments scheduled in 2019, with many more to follow," said Chris Butler, payload integration manager for the glovebox at Marshall.

The Life Sciences Glovebox will be transferred to a zero-gravity stowage rack in the station's Kibo module, where up to two crew members can conduct experiments simultaneously, overseen in real-time by project researchers on Earth.

Check out more pictures of the Glovebox HERE!

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From Earth to the Moon: How Are We Getting There?

More than 45 years since humans last set foot on the lunar surface, we’re going back to the Moon and getting ready for Mars. The Artemis program will send the first woman and next man to walk on the surface of the Moon by 2024, establish sustainable lunar exploration and pave the way for future missions deeper into the solar system.

Getting There

Our powerful new rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), will send astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft a quarter million miles from Earth to lunar orbit. The spacecraft is designed to support astronauts traveling hundreds of thousands of miles from home, where getting back to Earth takes days rather hours.

Lunar Outpost

Astronauts will dock Orion at our new lunar outpost that will orbit the Moon called the Gateway. This small spaceship will serve as a temporary home and office for astronauts in orbit between missions to the surface of the Moon. It will provide us and our partners access to the entire surface of the Moon, including places we’ve never been before like the lunar South Pole. Even before our first trip to Mars, astronauts will use the Gateway to train for life far away from Earth, and we will use it to practice moving a spaceship in different orbits in deep space.

Expeditions to the Moon

The crew will board a human landing system docked to the Gateway to take expeditions down to the surface of the Moon. We have proposed using a three-stage landing system, with a transfer vehicle to take crew to low-lunar orbit, a descent element to land safely on the surface, and an ascent element to take them back to the Gateway. 

Return to Earth

Astronauts will ultimately return to Earth aboard the Orion spacecraft. Orion will enter the Earth’s atmosphere traveling at 25,000 miles per hour, will slow to 300 mph, then parachutes will deploy to slow the spacecraft to approximately 20 mph before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.

Red Planet 

We will establish sustainable lunar exploration within the next decade, and from there, we will prepare for our next giant leap – sending astronauts to Mars!

Discover more about our plans to go to the Moon and on to Mars: https://www.nasa.gov/moontomars

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Blowing Bubbles in the Gamma-ray Sky

Did you know our Milky Way galaxy is blowing bubbles? Two of them, each 25,000 light-years tall! They extend above and below the disk of the galaxy, like the two halves of an hourglass. We can’t see them with our own eyes because they’re only apparent in gamma-ray light, the highest-energy light in the universe.

We didn’t even know these humongous structures were smack in the middle of our galaxy until 2010. Scientists found them when they analyzed the first two years of data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. They dubbed them the “Fermi bubbles” and found that in addition to being really big and spread out, they seem to have well-defined edges. The bubbles’ shape and the light they give off led scientists to think they were created by a rapid release of energy. But by what? And when?

One possible explanation is that they could be leftovers from the last big meal eaten by the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. This monster is more than 4 million times the mass of our own Sun. Scientists think it may have slurped up a big cloud of hydrogen between 6 and 9 million years ago and then burped jets of hot gas that we see in gamma rays and X-rays.

Another possible explanation is that the bubbles could be the remains of star formation. There are massive clusters of stars at very the center of the Milky Way — sometimes the stars are so closely packed they’re a million times more dense than in the outer suburb of the galaxy where we live. If there was a burst of star formation in this area a few million years ago, it could have created the surge of gas needed to in turn create the Fermi bubbles.

It took us until 2010 to see these Fermi bubbles because the sky is filled with a fog of other gamma rays that can obscure our view. This fog is created when particles moving near light speed bump into gas, dust, and light in the Milky Way. These collisions produce gamma rays, and scientists had to factor out the fog to unveil the bubbles.

Scientists continue to study the possible causes of these massive bubbles using the 10 years of data Fermi has collected so far. Fermi has also made many other exciting discoveries — like the the collision of superdense neutron stars and the nature of space-time. Learn more about Fermi and how we’ve been celebrating its first decade in space.

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10 Ways to Celebrate Halloween with NASA

There’s a whole universe of mysteries out there to put some fun—and maybe a touch of fright—into your All Hallows Eve festivities. Here are a few:

1. Universe of Monsters

Mythical monsters of Earth have a tough time of it. Vampires don’t do sunlight. Werewolves must wait for a full Moon to howl. Now, thanks to powerful space telescopes, some careful looking and a lot of whimsy, NASA scientists have found suitable homes for the most terrifying Halloween monsters.

2. Be a Spacecraft

No costume. No problem. NASA Blueshift offers some handy tips on transforming yourself into a powerful space telescope before hitting the sidewalk to trick-or-treat.

3. Robot Pumpkins

At Halloween, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory craft dramatic creations that have as much in common with standard jack-o'-lanterns as paper airplanes do with NASA spacecraft. The unofficial pumpkin carving contest gives engineers a chance to flex their creative muscles and bond as a team. The rules are simple: no planning, carving or competing during work hours.

The results? See for yourself!

Can’t wait to see this year’s creations? Do it yourself!

4. Skull Comet

Scientists think a large space rock that zipped past Earth on Halloween in 2015 was most likely a dead comet or an asteroid that, fittingly, bore an eerie resemblance to a skull.

"The object might be a dead comet, but in the (radar) images it appears to have donned a skull costume for its Halloween flyby," said NASA scientist Kelly Fast,

As with a lot of spooky things, the asteroid looked a lot less scary upon closer inspection.

5. Spooky Sun

Not to be outdone, the Sun—our star—has been known to put on a scary face.

In this October 2014 Solar Dynamic Observatory image, active regions on the Sun combined to look something like a jack-o-lantern’s face.

The active regions appear brighter because those are areas that emit more light and energy—markers of an intense and complex set of magnetic fields hovering in the Sun’s atmosphere, the corona. This image blends together two sets of wavelengths at 171 and 193 angstroms, typically colorized in gold and yellow, to create a particularly Halloween-like appearance.

6. Halloween on a Mission

Halloween held a special significance for NASA’s Cassini mission, which launched in October 1997. The team held its own elaborate pumpkin carving competitions for many years. The mission also shared whimsical Halloween greetingswith its home planet.

Cassini ended its extended mission at Saturn in 2017.

7. The Ghost of Cassiopeia

The brightest stars embedded in nebulae throughout our galaxy pour out a torrent of radiation that eats into vast clouds of hydrogen gas – the raw material for building new stars. This etching process sculpts a fantasy landscape where human imagination can see all kinds of shapes and figures. This nebula in the constellation of Cassiopeia has flowing veils of gas and dust that have earned it the nickname "Ghost Nebula."

8. They’re Everywhere

Turns out the human mind—including space scientists and engineers among us—find spooky shapes in many places.

This infrared view of the Helix Nebula reminded astronomers of a zombie eyeball.

9. What Do You See?

The Oct. 26 Earth Observatory’s Puzzler feature offers a spooky shape for your consideration. What is it and what does it look like? You tell us.

10. Space Candy

The trick-or-treat tradition is still—so far—pretty much confined to Earth. But thanks to the men and women who have been living aboard the International Space Station for more than 17 years, we have a preview of what a future space-based trick-or-treater’s Halloween candy haul would look like in microgravity.

Bonus: 11. Want More?

Our education team offers a bunch more Halloween activities, including space-themed pumpkin stencils, costume tips and even some mysteries to solve like a scientist or engineer.

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Great Scott, it’s Back to the Future Day – Oct. 21, 2015

What would a time traveler from 1985 discover about   NASA today?

It’s Back to the Future Day, the date in the second film that Marty and Doc traveled to in the future. When they arrived in 2015, it looked much different than today’s reality. Although we may not have self-drying jackets or flying cars, we do have some amazing spacecraft and technologies that were not around back when the film was made.

For example, in 1985 we did not have the capability to capture an image like this of our Earth. This full-Earth view captured Monday (10/19/15) by our camera on the Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVER, was not previously possible. The DSCOVR mission captures a daily sequence of images that show the Earth as it rotates, revealing the whole globe over the course of a day. These images will allow scientists to study daily variations over the entire globe in such features as vegetation, ozone, aerosols and cloud height and reflectivity.

So, we might not be cruising down the street on hover boards, but the movies didn’t get it all wrong in terms of how advanced we’d be in 2015.

When you were a kid, what technologies did you dream we’d have in the future that we may or may not have today? Here’s what two astronauts said:

NASA is much different than it was in 1985. Could we have dreamed these amazing accomplishments that have changed our world and understanding of the universe?

1. “There will be an orbiting laboratory where astronauts from around the world will live and work together.”

When Back to the Future II was set, the International Space Station didn’t exist yet. The first piece of the space station was launched in 1998, and the first crew arrived in 2000. Since November 2000, the station has been continuously occupied by humans. 

2. "We will find planets orbiting in the habitable zone of a star, and possibly suited for life."

The first exoplanet, or planet orbiting around a star, was found in 1995. Since then, we’ve discovered around a dozen habitable zone planets in the Earth-size range. While we aren’t able to zoom in to these planets that are light-years away, we’re still closer to finding another Earth-like planet in 2015 than we were in 1985. 

3. “Mars will become more populated.”

No, not by humans...yet. But, since the release of Back to the Future II, Mars has become a bit more populated with rovers and orbiters. These scientific spacecraft have played an important role in learning about the Red Planet. We currently have six missions at Mars. With the most recent news of liquid water on the surface of Mars, we can look forward to future missions returning even more data and images. The historical log of all Mars missions, both domestic and international can be found HERE. 

4. “We will launch a telescope into orbit that’s capable of looking at locations more than 13.4 billion light years from Earth.”

When Back to the Future II was released, our Hubble Space Telescope had not yet launched into orbit -- something that wouldn’t happen until April 1990. Since then, Hubble has made more than 1.2 million observations, and has traveled more than 3 billion miles along a circular low Earth orbit. For updates on Hubble’s findings, check HERE.

For more information about the technology that we’re developing at NASA, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology

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All aboard for the International Space Station!

Before research can get on a rocket to head to space, it is carefully prepared at Kennedy Space Center.

Scientists sometimes spend days, or even weeks, doing all of the last-minute preparations to get their investigation ready for microgravity.

This week on NASA Explorers, we follow a team of researchers in the final days before their experiment gets loaded into a SpaceX Dragon capsule that will carry their research to the space station.

Watch episode 4 here! 

Follow NASA Explorers on Facebook to catch new episodes of season 4 every Wednesday!

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What Happened to Mars?

Billions of years ago, Mars was a very different world. Liquid water flowed in long rivers that emptied into lakes and shallow seas. A thick atmosphere blanketed the planet and kept it warm.

Today, Mars is bitter cold. The Red Planet’s thin and wispy atmosphere provides scant cover for the surface below.

Our MAVEN Mission

The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission is part of our Mars Scout program. This spacecraft launched in November 2013, and is exploring the Red Planet’s upper atmosphere, ionosphere and interactions with the sun and solar wind.

The purpose of the MAVEN mission is to determine the state of the upper atmosphere of Mars, the processes that control it and the overall atmospheric loss that is currently occurring. Specifically, MAVEN is exploring the processes through which the top of the Martian atmosphere can be lost to space. Scientists think that this loss could be important in explaining the changes in the climate of Mars that have occurred over the last four billion years.

New Findings

Today, Nov. 5, we will share new details of key science findings from our ongoing exploration of Mars during a news briefing at 2 p.m. EDT. This event will be broadcast live on NASA Television. Have questions? Use #askNASA during the briefing.

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The answers are IN for your questions about our Perseverance rover and her upcoming mission to Mars! 

Sit back, relax, and get ready to learn some science and engineering! Experts Sarah Stewart Johnson and Lauren DuCharme are here to talk about the July 30 launch of our Perseverance mission, women in STEM, and much more. 

Our Answer Time starts now!