10 Steps To Confirm A Planet Around Another Star

Solar System: Things to Know This Week

Our solar system is huge, so let us break it down for you. Here are a few things to know this week:

1. We’re Going In

To be honest, Jupiter is kind of a monster. Not only is it the biggest planet in the solar system, but it also wields the most dangerous radiation and other powerful forces. Despite the risks, our Juno probe is going in close, because Jupiter also holds precious clues to how the planets formed, including our own. Arrival date: July 4. Watch the Juno mission trailer video HERE.

2. Moon Maps

The moon is beautiful in the sky, and also up close—sometimes even in the maps that scientists use to study its surface. Here are some evocative maps that lunar geologists have drawn up to chart the landscapes in the moon’s dramatic Tycho Crater. Take a look HERE.

3. That’s No Moon…Sort Of

The full moon we’ll see this week is not Earth’s only companion in space. Astronomers have discovered a small asteroid in an orbit around the sun that keeps it near the Earth, where it will remain for centuries. But it’s not exactly a second moon, either.

4. Power Blast

Venus has an “electric wind” strong enough to remove the components of water from its upper atmosphere, which may have played a significant role in stripping Earth’s twin planet of its oceans, according to new results from the European Space Agency (ESA) Venus Express mission by NASA-funded researchers.

5. How Green (Well, Red) Was My Valley

“Marathon Valley” slices through the rim of a large crater on Mars. It has provided fruitful research targets for our Opportunity rover since July 2015, but now the rover’s team is preparing to move on.

Want to learn more? Read our full list of the 10 things to know this week about the solar system HERE.

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Home is Where the Astronaut Is…

The International Space Station serves as a home, office and recreation room for astronauts. They share this confined space far above the Earth with crew members from different countries and cultures for as long as six months or more. At the same time, maintaining individual well-being and crew harmony is important for the crew and mission success.

The Culture, Values and Environmental Adaptation in Space (At Home in Space) Investigation, looks at changes in perceptions about home in space and the ways a unique culture may develop aboard the station during a mission. Discover more about this study HERE.

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What is it Like to Visit Jupiter?

Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system. For some perspective, if it were hollow, more than 1,300 Earths could fit inside of it! The giant planet contains two-thirds of all the planetary mass in the solar system and holds more than dozens of moons in its gravitational grip. But what about a visit to this giant planet?

Let’s be honest…Jupiter is not a nice place to visit. It’s a giant ball of gas and there’s nowhere to land. Any spacecraft – or person – passing through the colorful clouds gets crushed and melted. On Jupiter, the pressure is so strong it squishes gas into liquid. Its atmosphere can crush a metal spaceship like a paper cup.

Jupiter’s stripes and swirls are cold, windy clouds of ammonia and water. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a giant storm BIGGER THAN EARTH! This storm has lasted hundreds of years.

Since Jupiter’s atmosphere is made up of mostly hydrogen and helium, it’s poisonous. There’s also dangerous radiation, more than 1,000 times the lethal level for a human.  

Scientists think that Jupiter’s core may be a thick, super hot soup…up to 50,000 degrees! Woah!

The Moons

Did you know that Jupiter has its own “mini solar system” of 50 moons? Scientists are most interested in the Galilean satellites – which are the four largest moons discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610. 

Today, Galileo would be astounded to know some of the facts about these moons. The moon Io has active volcanos. Ganymede has its own magnetic field while Europa has a frozen crust with liquid-water underneath making it a tempting place to explore for future missions.

When Juno arrives to Jupiter on July 4, it will bring with it a slew of instruments such as infrared imager/spectrometer and vector magnetometer among the half a dozen other scientific tools in its payload.

Juno will avoid Jupiter's highest radiation regions by approaching over the north, dropping to an altitude below the planet's radiation belts – which are analogous to Earth’s Van Allen belts, but far more deadly – and then exiting over the south. To protect sensitive spacecraft electronics, Juno will carry the first radiation shielded electronics vault, a critical feature for enabling sustained exploration in such a heavy radiation environment.

Follow our Juno mission on the web, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Tumblr.

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What’s Up for January?

A meteor shower, a binocular comet and the winter circle of stars. Here are the details:

Quadrantid Meteor Shower

The Quadrantid meteor shower on Jan. 4 will either sizzle or fizzle for observers in the U.S. The shower may favor the U.S. or it could favor Europe depending on which prediction turns out to be correct. For viewing in the United States, observers should start at 3 a.m. EST. The peak should last about two hours with rates of 120 meteors per hour predicted in areas with a dark sky.

Comet Catalina

In the middle of the month, midnight to predawn will be primetime for viewing Comet Catalina. It should be visible with binoculars if you have a dark sky, but a telescope would be ideal. Between the 14th and 17th the comet will pass by two stunning galaxies: M51, the whirlpool galaxy and M101, a fainter spiral galaxy.

Constellation Orion

Winter is also the best time to view the constellation Orion in the southeastern sky. Even in the city, you’ll see that it’s stars have different colors. Not telescope needed, just look up a few hours after sunset! The colorful stars of Orion are part of the winter circle of stars.

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What part did you take in Perseverance' development?

Observing the Ozone Hole from Space: A Science Success Story

Using our unique ability to view Earth from space, we are working together with NOAA to monitor an emerging success story – the shrinking ozone hole over Antarctica.

Thirty years ago, the nations of the world agreed to the landmark ‘Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.’ The Protocol limited the release of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) into the atmosphere.

Since the 1960s our scientists have worked with NOAA researchers to study the ozone layer. 

We use a combination of satellite, aircraft and balloon measurements of the atmosphere.

The ozone layer acts like a sunscreen for Earth, blocking harmful ultraviolet, or UV, rays emitted by the Sun.

In 1985, scientists first reported a hole forming in the ozone layer over Antarctica. It formed over Antarctica because the Earth’s atmospheric circulation traps air over Antarctica.  This air contains chlorine released from the CFCs and thus it rapidly depletes the ozone.

Because colder temperatures speed up the process of CFCs breaking up and releasing chlorine more quickly, the ozone hole fluctuates with temperature. The hole shrinks during the warmer summer months and grows larger during the southern winter. In September 2006, the ozone hole reached a record large extent.

But things have been improving in the 30 years since the Montreal Protocol. Thanks to the agreement, the concentration of CFCs in the atmosphere has been decreasing, and the ozone hole maximum has been smaller since 2006’s record.

That being said, the ozone hole still exists and fluctuates depending on temperature because CFCs have very long lifetimes. So, they still exist in our atmosphere and continue to deplete the ozone layer.

To get a view of what the ozone hole would have looked like if the world had not come to the agreement to limit CFCs, our scientists developed computer models. These show that by 2065, much of Earth would have had almost no ozone layer at all.

Luckily, the Montreal Protocol exists, and we’ve managed to save our protective ozone layer. Looking into the future, our scientists project that by 2065, the ozone hole will have returned to the same size it was thirty years ago.

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What’s your favorite black hole fact that you like to share with people?

What Have We Learned About Pluto?

This month (March 2016), in the journal Science, New Horizons scientists have authored the first comprehensive set of papers describing results from last summer’s Pluto system flyby. These detailed papers completely transform our view of Pluto and reveal the former “astronomer’s planet” to be a real world with diverse and active geology, exotic surface chemistry, a complex atmosphere, puzzling interaction with the sun and an intriguing system of small moons.

Here’s a breakdown of what we’ve learned about Pluto:

1. Pluto has been geologically active throughout the past 4 billion years. The age-dating of Pluto’s surface through crater counts has revealed that Pluto has been geologically active throughout the past 4 billion years. Further, the surface of Pluto’s informally-named Sputnik Planum, a massive ice plain larger than Texas, is devoid of any detectable craters and estimated to be geologically young – no more than 10 million years old.

2. Pluto’s moon Charon has been discovered to have an ancient surface. As an example, the great expanse of smooth plains on Charon is likely a vast cryovolcanic flow or flows that erupted onto Charon’s surface about 4 billion years ago. These flows are likely related to the freezing of an internal ocean that globally ruptured Charon’s crust.

3. Pluto’s surface has many types of terrain. The distribution of compositional units on Pluto’s surface – from nitrogen-rich, to methane-rich, to water-rich – has been found to be surprisingly complex, creating puzzles for understanding Pluto’s climate and geologic history. The variations in surface composition on Pluto are unprecedented elsewhere in the outer solar system.

4. Pluto’s atmosphere is colder than we thought. Pluto’s upper atmospheric temperature has been found to be much colder (by about 70 degrees Fahrenheit) than had been thought from Earth-based studies, with important implications for its atmospheric escape rate. Why the atmosphere is colder is a mystery. 

5. We know what Pluto’s atmosphere is made of. The New Horizon spacecraft made observations of sunlight passing through Pluto’s atmosphere. We see absorption features that indicate an atmosphere made up of nitrogen (like Earth’s) with methane, acetylene and ethylene as minor constituents.

6. We might have an idea for how Pluto’s haze formed. For first time, a plausible mechanism for forming Pluto’s atmospheric haze layers has been found. This mechanism involves the concentration of haze particles by atmospheric buoyancy waves, created by winds blowing over Pluto’s mountainous topography. Pluto’s haze extends hundreds of kilometers into space, and embedded within it are over 20 very thin, but far brighter, layers.

7. There isn’t much dust around Pluto. Before the flyby, there was concern that a small piece of debris (even the size of a grain of sand) could cause great damage to (or even destroy) the spacecraft. But the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter (an instrument on the New Horizons spacecraft) only counted a single dust particle within five days of the flyby. This is similar to the density of dust particles in free space in the outer solar system – about 6 particles per cubic mile – showing that the region around Pluto is, in fact, not filled with debris.

8. Pluto’s atmosphere is smaller than we expected. The uppermost region of Pluto’s atmosphere is slowly escaping to space. The hotter the upper atmosphere, the more rapid the gasses escape. The lower the planet’s mass, the lower the gravity, and the faster the atmospheric loss. As molecules escape, they are ionized by solar ultraviolet light. Once ionized, the charged molecules are carried away by the solar wind. As more Pluto-genic material is picked up by the solar wind, the more the solar wind is slowed down and deflected around Pluto. So - the net result is a region (the interaction region), which is like a blunt cone pointed toward the sun, where the escaping ionized gasses interact with the solar wind. The cone extends to a distance about 6 Pluto radii from Pluto toward the sun, but extend behind Pluto at least 400 Pluto radii behind Pluto - like a wake behind the dwarf planet.

9. Pluto’s moons are brighter than we thought. The high albedos (reflectiveness) of Pluto’s small satellites (moons) – about 50 to 80 percent – are entirely different from the much lower reflectiveness of the small bodies in the general Kuiper Belt population, which range from about 5 to 20 percent. This difference lends further support to the idea that these moons were not captured from the general Kuiper Belt population, but instead formed by the collection of material produced in the aftermath of the giant collision that created the entire Pluto satellite system.  

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I really want to work for NASA but I do not have a background in science or engineering. Are there any career paths at NASA that I could still achieve?

What’s Up for June 2016?

What's Up for June? Saturn at its best! Plus, good views of Mars, Jupiter and Jupiter's moons continue from dusk to dawn.

You don't have to stay up late to see Jupiter, Mars and Saturn this month, because they're all visible soon after sunset. Jupiter is the brightest of the three, visible in the western sky all evening. 

The four Galilean moons are easily visible in binoculars or telescopes. If you think you're seeing 5 moons on June 10th, you're not. One of them is a distant star in the constellation Leo.

For telescope viewers, the time near Mars' closest approach to Earth, May 30th this year, is the best time to try to see the two moons of Mars: Phobos and Deimos. It takes patience, very steady skies and good charts! Mars is still large and bright in early June, but it fades as speedy Earth, in its shorter orbit around the sun, passes it.

Saturn has been close to Mars recently. This month Saturn reaches opposition, when Saturn, Earth and the sun are in a straight line with Earth in the middle, providing the best and closest views of the ringed beauty and several of its moons. You'll be able to make out cloud bands on Saturn, in delicate shades of cream and butterscotch. They're fainter than the bands of Jupiter. Through a telescope you'll see Saturn's rings tilted about as wide as they get: 26 degrees.

You'll also have a ring-side view of the Cassini division, discovered by Giovanni Domenico Cassini, namesake of our Cassini spacecraft, orbiting Saturn since 2004 and continuing through September 2017. When you look at Saturn through a telescope, you can't help but see several of its 4 brightest moons, and maybe more. If you just see one, that's Titan, 50% larger than our own moon. A telescope can also reveal more moons, like Saturn's two-colored moon Iapetus. It takes 3 months to orbit Saturn, and it's fairly easy to see.

There's a bright comet visible this month, Comet PanSTARRS. It's best seen from the southern hemisphere, but it's also visible from the U.S. low in the morning sky. Comet PanSTARRS can be seen through a telescope near the beautiful Helix Nebula on June 4, but it is visible all month.

Watch the full June “What’s Up” video for more: https://youtu.be/M7RtIa9zBYA

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