7 Things You Need To Know About Small Satellites

What’s Up - June 2018

What’s Up For June?

Jupiter and Venus at sunset, Mars, Saturn and Vesta until dawn.

First up is Venus. It reaches its highest sunset altitude for the year this month and sets more than two hours after sunset.

You can't miss Jupiter, only a month after its opposition--when Earth was directly between Jupiter and the Sun.

The best time to observe Jupiter through a telescope is 10:30 p.m. at the beginning of the month and as soon as it's dark by the end of the month.  

Just aim your binoculars at the bright planet for a view including the four Galilean moons. Or just enjoy Jupiter with your unaided eye!

Saturn is at opposition June 27th, when it and the Sun are on opposite sides of Earth. It rises at sunset and sets at sunrise. Great Saturn viewing will last several more months. The best views this month will be just after midnight.

All year, the rings have been tilted wide open--almost 26 degrees wide this month--giving us a great view of Saturn's distinctive rings.

The tilt offers us a view of the north polar region, so exquisitely imaged by the Cassini spacecraft.

Near Saturn, the brightest asteroid--Vesta--is so bright that it can be seen with your unaided eye. It will be visible for several months.

A detailed star chart will help you pick out the asteroid from the stars. The summer Milky way provides a glittery backdrop.

Finally, Mars grows dramatically in brightness and size this month and is visible by 10:30 p.m. by month end.

The best views are in the early morning hours. Earth's closest approach with Mars is only a month away. It's the closest Mars has been to us since 2003.

Watch the full What’s Up for June Video: 

There are so many sights to see in the sky. To stay informed, subscribe to our What’s Up video series on Facebook. Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.  

Meet Our Latest CubeSats

When the next Orbital ATK cargo mission to the International Space Station blasts off from Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on May 20 at 5:04 a.m. EDT carrying science and supplies, the Cygnus spacecraft will also be carrying a few of our latest CubeSats.

The International Space Station is often used to deploy small satellites, a low-cost way to test technology and science techniques in space.

On board this time, for deployment later this summer, are...

The ‘Rabbit’ in the RainCube

As its name suggests, RainCube will use radar to measure rain and snowfall. CubeSats are measured in increments of 1U (A CubeSat unit, or 1U, is roughly equivalent to a 4-inch box, or 10x10x10 centimeters). The RainCube antenna has to be small enough to be crammed into a 1.5U container; the entire satellite is about as big as a cereal box.

"It's like pulling a rabbit out of a hat," said Nacer Chahat, a specialist in antenna design at our Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "Shrinking the size of the radar is a challenge for us. As space engineers, we usually have lots of volume, so building antennas packed into a small volume isn't something we're trained to do."

That small antenna will deploy in space, like an upside-down umbrella. To maintain its small size, the antenna relies on the high-frequency Ka-band wavelength – good for profiling rain and snow. Ka-band also allows for an exponential increase in sending data over long distances, making it the perfect tool for telecommunications.

Peering Into Clouds

TEMPEST-D will also study weather. Temporal Experiment for Storms and Tropical Systems – Demonstration (TEMPEST-D) has satellite technology with the potential to measure cloud and precipitation processes on a global basis. These measurements help improve understanding of Earth’s water cycle and weather predictions, particularly conditions inside storms.

TEMPEST-D millimeter-wave observations have the ability to penetrate into clouds to where precipitation initiation occurs. By measuring the evolution of clouds from the moment of the onset of precipitation, a future TEMPEST constellation mission could improve weather forecasting and improve our understanding of cloud processes, essential to understanding climate change.

Cutting Through the Noise

CubeRRT, also the size of a cereal box, will space test a small component designed to detect and filter radio frequency interference (RFI). RFI is everywhere, from cellphones, radio and TV transmissions, satellite broadcasts and other sources. You probably recognize it as that annoying static when you can’t seem to get your favorite radio station to come in clearly because another station is nearby on the dial.

The same interference that causes radio static also affects the quality of data that instruments like microwave radiometers collect. As the number of RFI-causing devices increases globally, our satellite instruments – specifically, microwave radiometers that gather data on soil moisture, meteorology, climate and more – will be more challenged in collecting high-quality data.

That’s where CubeSat Radiometer Radio frequency interference Technology (CubeRRT) comes in. The small satellite will be carrying a new technology to detect and filter any RFI the satellite encounters in real-time from space. This will reduce the amount of data that needs to be transmitted back to Earth – increasing the quality of important weather and climate measurements.

Searching the Halo of the Milky Way

Did you know that we’re still looking for half of the normal matter that makes up the universe? Scientists have taken a census of all the stars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies — and we’re coming up short, based on what we know about the early days of the cosmos.

That missing matter might be hiding in tendrils of hot gas between galaxies. Or it might be in the halos of hot gas around individual galaxies like our own Milky Way. But if it’s there, why haven’t we seen it? It could be that it’s so hot that it glows in a spectrum of X-rays we haven’t looked at before.

Image Credit: Blue Canyon Technologies

Enter HaloSat. Led by the University of Iowa, HaloSat will search the halo of the Milky Way for the emissions oxygen gives off at these very high temperatures. Most other X-ray satellites look at narrow patches of the sky and at individual sources. HaloSat will look at large swaths of the sky at a time, which will help us figure out the geometry of the halo — whether it surrounds the galaxy more like a fried egg or a sphere. Knowing the halo’s shape will in turn help us figure out the mass, which may help us discover if the universe’s missing matter is in galactic halos.

CubeSats for All

Small satellites benefit Earth and its people (us!) in multiple ways. From Earth imaging satellites that help meteorologists to predict storm strengths and direction, to satellites that focus on technology demonstrations to help determine what materials function best in a microgravity environment, the science enabled by CubeSats is diverse. 

They are also a pathway to space science for students. Our CubeSat Launch initiative (CSLI) provides access to space for small satellites developed by our Centers and programs, educational institutions and nonprofit organizations. Since the program began, more than 50 educational CubeSats have flown. In 2016, students built the first CubeSat deployed into space by an elementary school.

Learn more about CubeSats HERE. 

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What is it like floating in space?

What encouraging words would you say to girls and women with dreams and ambitions who live in oppressive environments?

Of course Saturn brought its ring light.

On June 25, 2023, our James Webb Space Telescope made its first near-infrared observations of Saturn. The planet itself appears extremely dark at this infrared wavelength, since methane gas absorbs almost all the sunlight falling on the atmosphere. The icy rings, however, stay relatively bright, leading to Saturn’s unusual appearance in this image.

This new image of Saturn clearly shows details within the planet’s ring system, several of the planet’s moons (Dione, Enceladus, and Tethys), and even Saturn’s atmosphere in surprising and unexpected detail.

These observations from Webb are just a hint at what this observatory will add to Saturn’s story in the coming years as the science team delves deep into the data to prepare peer-reviewed results.

Download the full-resolution image, both labeled and unlabeled, from the Space Telescope Science Institute.

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The Hunt for New Worlds Continues with TESS

We're getting ready to start our next mission to find new worlds! The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will find thousands of planets beyond our solar system for us to study in more detail. It's preparing to launch from our Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

Once it launches, TESS will look for new planets that orbit bright stars relatively close to Earth. We're expecting to find giant planets, like Jupiter, but we're also predicting we'll find Earth-sized planets. Most of those planets will be within 300 light-years of Earth, which will make follow-up studies easier for other observatories.

TESS will find these new exoplanets by looking for their transits. A transit is a temporary dip in a star's brightness that happens with predictable timing when a planet crosses between us and the star. The information we get from transits can tell us about the size of the planet relative to the size of its star. We've found nearly 3,000 planets using the transit method, many with our Kepler space telescope. That's over 75% of all the exoplanets we've found so far!

TESS will look at nearly the entire sky (about 85%) over two years. The mission divides the sky into 26 sectors. TESS will look at 13 of them in the southern sky during its first year before scanning the northern sky the year after.

What makes TESS different from the other planet-hunting missions that have come before it? The Kepler mission (yellow) looked continually at one small patch of sky, spotting dim stars and their planets that are between 300 and 3,000 light-years away. TESS (blue) will look at almost the whole sky in sections, finding bright stars and their planets that are between 30 and 300 light-years away.

TESS will also have a brand new kind of orbit (visualized below). Once it reaches its final trajectory, TESS will finish one pass around Earth every 13.7 days (blue), which is half the time it takes for the Moon (gray) to orbit. This position maximizes the amount of time TESS can stare at each sector, and the satellite will transmit its data back to us each time its orbit takes it closest to Earth (orange).

Kepler's goal was to figure out how common Earth-size planets might be. TESS's mission is to find exoplanets around bright, nearby stars so future missions, like our James Webb Space Telescope, and ground-based observatories can learn what they're made of and potentially even study their atmospheres. TESS will provide a catalog of thousands of new subjects for us to learn about and explore.

The TESS mission is led by MIT and came together with the help of many different partners. Learn more about TESS and how it will further our knowledge of exoplanets, or check out some more awesome images and videos of the spacecraft. And stay tuned for more exciting TESS news as the spacecraft launches!

Watch the Launch!

*April 16 Update*

Launch teams are standing down today to conduct additional Guidance Navigation and Control analysis, and teams are now working towards a targeted launch of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) on Wednesday, April 18. The TESS spacecraft is in excellent health, and remains ready for launch. TESS will launch on a Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

For more information and updates, visit: https://blogs.nasa.gov/tess/

Live Launch Coverage!

TESS is now slated to launch on Wednesday, April 18 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from our Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Watch HERE.

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Black Holes are NICER Than You Think!

We’re learning more every day about black holes thanks to one of the instruments aboard the International Space Station! Our Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) instrument is keeping an eye on some of the most mysterious cosmic phenomena.

We’re going to talk about some of the amazing new things NICER is showing us about black holes. But first, let’s talk about black holes — how do they work, and where do they come from? There are two important types of black holes we’ll talk about here: stellar and supermassive. Stellar mass black holes are three to dozens of times as massive as our Sun while supermassive black holes can be billions of times as massive!

Stellar black holes begin with a bang — literally! They are one of the possible objects left over after a large star dies in a supernova explosion. Scientists think there are as many as a billion stellar mass black holes in our Milky Way galaxy alone!

Supermassive black holes have remained rather mysterious in comparison. Data suggest that supermassive black holes could be created when multiple black holes merge and make a bigger one. Or that these black holes formed during the early stages of galaxy formation, born when massive clouds of gas collapsed billions of years ago. There is very strong evidence that a supermassive black hole lies at the center of all large galaxies, as in our Milky Way.

Imagine an object 10 times more massive than the Sun squeezed into a sphere approximately the diameter of New York City — or cramming a billion trillion people into a car! These two examples give a sense of how incredibly compact and dense black holes can be.

Because so much stuff is squished into such a relatively small volume, a black hole’s gravity is strong enough that nothing — not even light — can escape from it. But if light can’t escape a dark fate when it encounters a black hole, how can we “see” black holes?

Scientists can’t observe black holes directly, because light can’t escape to bring us information about what’s going on inside them. Instead, they detect the presence of black holes indirectly — by looking for their effects on the cosmic objects around them. We see stars orbiting something massive but invisible to our telescopes, or even disappearing entirely!

When a star approaches a black hole’s event horizon — the point of no return — it’s torn apart. A technical term for this is “spaghettification” — we’re not kidding! Cosmic objects that go through the process of spaghettification become vertically stretched and horizontally compressed into thin, long shapes like noodles.

Scientists can also look for accretion disks when searching for black holes. These disks are relatively flat sheets of gas and dust that surround a cosmic object such as a star or black hole. The material in the disk swirls around and around, until it falls into the black hole. And because of the friction created by the constant movement, the material becomes super hot and emits light, including X-rays.  

At last — light! Different wavelengths of light coming from accretion disks are something we can see with our instruments. This reveals important information about black holes, even though we can’t see them directly.

So what has NICER helped us learn about black holes? One of the objects this instrument has studied during its time aboard the International Space Station is the ever-so-forgettably-named black hole GRS 1915+105, which lies nearly 36,000 light-years — or 200 million billion miles — away, in the direction of the constellation Aquila.

Scientists have found disk winds — fast streams of gas created by heat or pressure — near this black hole. Disk winds are pretty peculiar, and we still have a lot of questions about them. Where do they come from? And do they change the shape of the accretion disk?

It’s been difficult to answer these questions, but NICER is more sensitive than previous missions designed to return similar science data. Plus NICER often looks at GRS 1915+105 so it can see changes over time.

NICER’s observations of GRS 1915+105 have provided astronomers a prime example of disk wind patterns, allowing scientists to construct models that can help us better understand how accretion disks and their outflows around black holes work.

NICER has also collected data on a stellar mass black hole with another long name — MAXI J1535-571 (we can call it J1535 for short) — adding to information provided by NuSTAR, Chandra, and MAXI. Even though these are all X-ray detectors, their observations tell us something slightly different about J1535, complementing each other’s data!

This rapidly spinning black hole is part of a binary system, slurping material off its partner, a star. A thin halo of hot gas above the disk illuminates the accretion disk and causes it to glow in X-ray light, which reveals still more information about the shape, temperature, and even the chemical content of the disk. And it turns out that J1535’s disk may be warped!

Image courtesy of NRAO/AUI and Artist: John Kagaya (Hoshi No Techou)

This isn’t the first time we have seen evidence for a warped disk, but J1535’s disk can help us learn more about stellar black holes in binary systems, such as how they feed off their companions and how the accretion disks around black holes are structured.

NICER primarily studies neutron stars — it’s in the name! These are lighter-weight relatives of black holes that can be formed when stars explode. But NICER is also changing what we know about many types of X-ray sources. Thanks to NICER’s efforts, we are one step closer to a complete picture of black holes. And hey, that’s pretty nice!

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Sample Return Robot Challenge

It’s been a long, technical journey for the seven teams competing this week in Level 2 of our Sample Return Robot Challenge. Over the past five years, more than 50 teams have attempted the $1.5 million competition, which is looking to develop autonomous capabilities in robotics. Basically, we want robots that can think and act on their own, so they can travel to far off places – like Mars – and we can rely on them to work on their own when a time delay or unknown conditions could be factors.

This challenge has two levels, both requiring robots to navigate without human control and Earth-based tools (like GPS or magnetic compassing). The robot has to find samples, pick them up and deliver them to home base. Each of the final seven teams succeeded at Level 1, where they had to find one sample, during previous competition years. Now, they have a shot at the much more difficult Level 2, where they have a two-hour window to locate up to 10 samples of varying point values, but they don’t know where to look or what exactly they’re looking for.

Get to know the final seven, and be sure to cheer them on as we live-stream the competition all day Sept. 4 and 5.

West Virginia University Mountaineers Hailing from: Morgantown, West Virginia # of Team Members:  12

Behind the Name: In West Virginia, we call ourselves mountaineers. We like to explore unknown places and be inspired by nature.

Motivation: To challenge ourselves. Through this venture, we are also hoping to create research and career opportunities for everyone on the team.

Strategy: Keeping things simple. Through participating in SRR challenge during the last three years, we have gone a long way in streamlining our system.

Obstacles: One of the biggest challenges was finding and nurturing the talent of individual team members and coordinating the team in making real progress on time.

Prize Plans: We donated 50 percent of our 2015 Level 2 prize money to create an undergraduate “Robotics Achievement Fellowship” at WVU. The rest of the funding was allocated to support team member professional development, such as traveling to conferences. A similar model will be used if we win in 2016.

Extra Credit:  We did an Easter egg hunt with our robot, Cataglyphis (named after a desert ant with extraordinary navigation capabilities), last year.

Survey Hailing from: Los Angeles, California # of Team Members: Jascha Little

Behind the Name: It's short, simple, and what the robot spends a lot of its time doing.

Team History: We work together, and we all thought the challenge sounded like an excellent way to solve the problem of what to do with all our free time.

Motivation: We are all engineers and software developers that already work on robotics projects. Reading too much sci-fi when we were kids probably got us to this point.

Strategy: We are trying to solve the search-and-return problem primarily with computer vision. This is mostly to reduce cost. Our budget can't handle high quality IMUs or LIDAR.

Prize Plans: Probably build more robots.

Extra Credit: Favorite pop culture robot is Bender (Futurama). Alcoholic robots are the best.

Alabama Astrobotics (The University of Alabama) Hailing from: Tuscaloosa, Alabama # of Team Members: 33

Behind the Name: “Alabama Astrobotics” was chosen to reflect our school affiliation and our mission to design robotics for various space applications.

Team History: Alabama Astrobotics has been involved with other NASA robotics competitions in the past.  So, the team is accustomed to the competition environment.  

Motivation: We are pleased to have advanced to Level 2 in our first year in the competition (the first team to do so), but we are also not satisfied with just advancing.  Our goal is to try to solve Level 2.

Strategy: Our strategy is similar to that used in Level 1.  Our Level 1 approach was chosen so that it would translate to Level 2 as well, thus requiring fewer customizations from Level 1 to Level 2.

Obstacles: As a university team, the biggest challenge was not having all our team members available to work on the robot during the time since Level 1 completed in June. Most of my team members have either graduated or have summer internships, which took them away from campus after Level 1.  Thus, we didn’t have the manpower to address the additional Level 2 technical challenges.

Prize Plans: Any prize money would be donated to the University of Alabama College of Engineering.

Extra Credit: Alabama Astrobotics also competes in the annual NASA Robotic Mining Competition held at the Kennedy Space Center each May.  We have been fortunate enough to win that competition three times in its seven year history, and we are the only team to win it more than once.

MAXed-Out Hailing From: Santa Clara, California # of Team Members: 4

Behind the Name: Several reasons: Team leader is Greg Maxwell, and his school nick name was Max. Our robot’s name is Max, which is one of the most common name for a dog, and it is a retriever. Our efforts on this has been too the max…. i.e. MAXed-Out. Our technology requirements have been pushed to their limits - Maxed-Out.

Team History: Greg Maxwell started a Meet-up “Silicon-Valley Robot Operating System” SV-ROS that was to help teach hobbyists how to use ROS on their robots. We needed a project to help implement and make real what we were teaching. This is the third contest we have participated in.

Motivation: There is still such a long way to go to make robots practical. Every little bit we can contribute makes them a little bit better and smarter. Strategy: Level 1 was a test, as a minimum viable product to prove the tech worked. For Level 2, we had to test and add obstacle avoidance to be able to cover the larger area with trees and slopes, plus add internal guidance to allow for Max to be out of the home base camera tracking system.

Obstacles: Lack of a cost effective robot platform that met all the requirements; we had to build our own. Also time and money. The two months (between Level 1 and 2) went really fast, and we had to abandon lots of cool ideas and focus on the basics.

Prize Plans: Not sure, but pay off the credit cards comes to mind. We might open-source the platform since it works pretty well. Or we will see if it works as expected. We may also take a break / vacation away from robots for a while.

Extra Credit: My nephew, Max Hieges, did our logo, based on the 1960-era Rat Fink sticker.

Mind & Iron Hailing From: Seattle, Washington # of Team Members: 5

Behind the Name: It was the original title for Isaac Asimov’s “I Robot,” and we thought it was a good combination of what a robot actually is – mechanical and brains.

Team History: Three of us were WPI undergrads and met at school; two of us did our master’s degrees at the University of Washington, where we met another member, and then another of us brought on a family member.

Motivation: We saw that there was an opportunity to compete in a challenge that seemed like there was a reasonable solution that we could tackle with a limited budget. We saw three years of competition and thought that we had some better ideas and a pretty good shot at it. Strategy: The samples and the terrain are much more complex in Level 2, and we have to be more careful about our navigation. We are using the same tools, just expanding their capability and scope.

Obstacles: The team being spread over three different time zones has been the biggest challenge. We are all doing this in our free time after work. The internet has been really handy to get things done.

Prize Plans: Probably invest in more robot stuff! And look for other cool projects we can work on, whether it’s another NASA challenge or other projects.

Extra Credit: We are hoping to collaborate with NASA on the professional side with surgical robots to exoskeletons. Challenge-related, our robot is mostly made of plywood – it is a composite fiber material that works well for fast development using cheap materials.

Sirius Hailing From: South Hadley, Massachusetts # of Team Members: 4

Team History: We are a family. Our kids are both robot builders who work for Boston Dynamics, and they have a lot of robot expertise. Both of our kids are robotics engineers, and my wife is intrinsically brilliant, so the combination of that makes for a good team.

Motivation: Because it’s a really hard challenge. It’s one thing to drive a robot with a remote control; it’s another to do the whole thing autonomously. If you make a single change in a robot, it could throw everything off. You have to think through every step for the robot. On a basic level, to learn more about robotics and to win the prize. Strategy: Very similar to Level 1. We approached Level 1 knowing Level 2 was there, so our strategy was no different.

Obstacles: It is very difficult to do object recognition under unpredictable conditions – sun, clouds, weather, sample location. The biggest challenge was trying to recognize known and unknown objects under such a wide variety of environmental possibilities. And the terrain is very different – you don’t know what you’re going to find out there.

Prize Plans: We haven’t really thought about it, but we will give some away, and we’ll invest the rest in our robotics company.

Extra Credit: The first robot we had was called Robo-Dad. Dan was training to be an astronaut in the 1990s, so we built a toy remote-controlled truck that Dan - in Texas - could control via the internet in the house. Robo-Dad had a camera that Dan could see the house with. It had two-way communication; it was a little before it’s time – the internet was very slow.

Team AL Hailing From: Ontario, Canada # of Team Members: 1

Team History: I was looking for competitions that were open, and my dad had followed the Centennial Challenges for a while, so he alerted me to this one. I was already doing rover projects, and it was appropriate and awesome and interesting. I felt like I could do it as a team of one.

Motivation: Difficult challenges. I’m definitely inspired seeing really cool robots that other people are building. New emerging tech really motives me to create new things.

Strategy: I showed up with another robot to Level 2. I built three, but ran with only two. It did make it more complicated, but the strategy was to send them to different areas and have them be able to communicate with each other. Everything physically was the same from Level 1.  The idea is that they would all go out with different missions and I would maximize field coverage.

Obstacles: Time. More time would always be nice. Being able to make something like this happen under a timeline is really difficult. I feel like I accomplished a lot for a year. Also, manpower – being a team of 1, I have to do all of the paperwork and other related stuff, but also carry the hardware and do the programming. You have to multitask a lot.

Prize Plans: I’d like to start a robotics company, and be able to expand some of the things I’ve been working on associated with technology and maker education.

Extra Credit: My story is not linear. A lot of people are surprised to hear that my background is in molecular biology and  research. I once lived in a tent in Madagascar for a few months to do a biodiversity study, and I have multiple publications from that side of my life. I am in a whole different place now.

The competition is one of many run by our Centennial Challenges program, which looks to the public – citizen inventors, academics, makers, artists, YOU – to help us advance technology and bring a different perspective to obstacles that gets us outside of our traditional solving community. See what else we’re working on here.

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Decoding Nebulae

We can agree that nebulae are some of the most majestic-looking objects in the universe. But what are they exactly? Nebulae are giant clouds of gas and dust in space. They’re commonly associated with two parts of the life cycle of stars: First, they can be nurseries forming new baby stars. Second, expanding clouds of gas and dust can mark where stars have died.

Not all nebulae are alike, and their different appearances tell us what's happening around them. Since not all nebulae emit light of their own, there are different ways that the clouds of gas and dust reveal themselves. Some nebulae scatter the light of stars hiding in or near them. These are called reflection nebulae and are a bit like seeing a street lamp illuminate the fog around it.

In another type, called emission nebulae, stars heat up the clouds of gas, whose chemicals respond by glowing in different colors. Think of it like a neon sign hanging in a shop window!

Finally there are nebulae with dust so thick that we’re unable to see the visible light from young stars shine through it. These are called dark nebulae.

Our missions help us see nebulae and identify the different elements that oftentimes light them up.

The Hubble Space Telescope is able to observe the cosmos in multiple wavelengths of light, ranging from ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared. Hubble peered at the iconic Eagle Nebula in visible and infrared light, revealing these grand spires of dust and countless stars within and around them.

The Chandra X-ray Observatory studies the universe in X-ray light! The spacecraft is helping scientists see features within nebulae that might otherwise be hidden by gas and dust when viewed in longer wavelengths like visible and infrared light. In the Crab Nebula, Chandra sees high-energy X-rays from a pulsar (a type of rapidly spinning neutron star, which is the crushed, city-sized core of a star that exploded as a supernova).

The James Webb Space Telescope will primarily observe the infrared universe. With Webb, scientists will peer deep into clouds of dust and gas to study how stars and planetary systems form.

The Spitzer Space Telescope studied the cosmos for over 16 years before retiring in 2020. With the help of its detectors, Spitzer revealed unknown materials hiding in nebulae — like oddly-shaped molecules and soot-like materials, which were found in the California Nebula.

Studying nebulae helps scientists understand the life cycle of stars. Did you know our Sun got its start in a stellar nursery? Over 4.5 billion years ago, some gas and dust in a nebula clumped together due to gravity, and a baby Sun was born. The process to form a baby star itself can take a million years or more!

After billions more years, our Sun will eventually puff into a huge red giant star before leaving behind a beautiful planetary nebula (so-called because astronomers looking through early telescopes thought they resembled planets), along with a small, dense object called a white dwarf that will cool down very slowly. In fact, we don’t think the universe is old enough yet for any white dwarfs to have cooled down completely.

Since the Sun will live so much longer than us, scientists can't observe its whole life cycle directly ... but they can study tons of other stars and nebulae at different phases of their lives and draw conclusions about where our Sun came from and where it's headed. While studying nebulae, we’re seeing the past, present, and future of our Sun and trillions of others like it in the cosmos.

To keep up with the most recent cosmic news, follow NASA Universe on Twitter and Facebook.

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Take a dive between Saturn and its rings to see what our Cassini spacecraft saw during its first daring plunge on April 26! 

As Cassini made its first-ever dive through the gap between Saturn and its rings on April 26, 2017, one of its imaging cameras took a series of rapid-fire images that were used to make this movie sequence. The video begins with a view of the vortex at Saturn's north pole, then heads past the outer boundary of the planet's hexagon-shaped jet stream and continues further southward. 

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