Hello Serena! I Was Wondering If Given The Chance Would You Be Apart Of A Mission To Mars In The Near

James Webb Space Telescope

Imagine seeing 13 billion years back in time, watching the first stars grow, galaxies evolve and solar systems form…our James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will do just that!

As the successor to our Hubble Space Telescope, JWST will be the premier observatory of the next decade, serving thousands of astronomers worldwide. Seems like a lot of pressure, right? Well luckily, JWST is being prepared to fulfill its job by some super smart people…to be exact: more than 1,000 people in more than 17 countries! Once completed and deployed, it will be able to study every phase in the history of our Universe, ranging from the luminous glows after the Big Bang, to the formation of solar systems.

The Webb Telescope incorporates several innovative technologies, such as its primary mirror that’s made of 18 separate segments! They are able to unfold and adjust to shape after launch, and are made up of ultra-lightweight beryllium.

The sunshield is another impressive component of the telescope. The sunshield of the Webb Telescope is its biggest feature, and is the size of a tennis court! This five-layer monstrosity will deflect light and heat from the Sun, and allow pieces of the observatory to be kept very cold so they are able to operate properly.

Last week, we successfully installed the first of 18 flight mirrors onto the telescope, beginning a critical piece of the observatory’s construction. The engineering team used a robot arm to lift and lower the hexagonal-shaped segment that measures just over 4.2 feet (1.3 meters) across and weighs approximately 88 pounds (40 kilograms). The full installation is expected to be complete early next year.

This telescope is an international collaboration between NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), and is scheduled to launch in October of 2018 on an Ariane 5 rocket. Until then, be sure to keep up with construction of this next generation space telescope: Twitter, Facebook.

Also, make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com 

Ready for a virtual adventure through the Orion Nebula?

Suspended in space, the stars that reside in the Orion Nebula are scattered throughout a dramatic dust-and-gas landscape of plateaus, mountains, and valleys that are reminiscent of the Grand Canyon. This visualization uses visible and infrared views, combining images from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope to create a three-dimensional visualization.

Learn more about Hubble’s celebration of Nebula November and see new nebula images, here.

You can also keep up with Hubble on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Flickr!

Visualization credits: NASA, ESA, and F. Summers, G. Bacon, Z. Levay, J. DePasquale, L. Hustak, L. Frattare, M. Robberto, M. Gennaro (STScI), R. Hurt (Caltech/IPAC), M. Kornmesser (ESA); Acknowledgement: A. Fujii, R. Gendler

Pumpkin space latte, anyone? ☕

Hubble captured this festive array of stars, Terzan 12, found in the Milky Way about 15,000 light-years from Earth. The stars in this cluster are bound together by gravity in a sphere-like shape and are shrouded in gas and dust. As the starlight travels through that gas and dust to Earth, blue light scatters, leaving the redder wavelengths to come through.

Download the full-resolution image here.

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Using All of Our Senses in Space

Today, we and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the detection of light and a high-energy cosmic particle that both came from near a black hole billions of trillions of miles from Earth. This discovery is a big step forward in the field of multimessenger astronomy.

But wait — what is multimessenger astronomy? And why is it a big deal?

People learn about different objects through their senses: sight, touch, taste, hearing and smell. Similarly, multimessenger astronomy allows us to study the same astronomical object or event through a variety of “messengers,” which include light of all wavelengths, cosmic ray particles, gravitational waves, and neutrinos — speedy tiny particles that weigh almost nothing and rarely interact with anything. By receiving and combining different pieces of information from these different messengers, we can learn much more about these objects and events than we would from just one.

Lights, Detector, Action!  

Much of what we know about the universe comes just from different wavelengths of light. We study the rotations of galaxies through radio waves and visible light, investigate the eating habits of black holes through X-rays and gamma rays, and peer into dusty star-forming regions through infrared light.

The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which recently turned 10, studies the universe by detecting gamma rays — the highest-energy form of light. This allows us to investigate some of the most extreme objects in the universe.

Last fall, Fermi was involved in another multimessenger finding — the very first detection of light and gravitational waves from the same source, two merging neutron stars. In that instance, light and gravitational waves were the messengers that gave us a better understanding of the neutron stars and their explosive merger into a black hole.

Fermi has also advanced our understanding of blazars, which are galaxies with supermassive black holes at their centers. Black holes are famous for drawing material into them. But with blazars, some material near the black hole shoots outward in a pair of fast-moving jets. With blazars, one of those jets points directly at us!

Multimessenger Astronomy is Cool

Today’s announcement combines another pair of messengers. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory lies a mile under the ice in Antarctica and uses the ice itself to detect neutrinos. When IceCube caught a super-high-energy neutrino and traced its origin to a specific area of the sky, they alerted the astronomical community.

Fermi completes a scan of the entire sky about every three hours, monitoring thousands of blazars among all the bright gamma-ray sources it sees. For months it had observed a blazar producing more gamma rays than usual. Flaring is a common characteristic in blazars, so this did not attract special attention. But when the alert from IceCube came through about a neutrino coming from that same patch of sky, and the Fermi data were analyzed, this flare became a big deal!

IceCube, Fermi, and followup observations all link this neutrino to a blazar called TXS 0506+056. This event connects a neutrino to a supermassive black hole for the very first time.  

Why is this such a big deal? And why haven’t we done it before? Detecting a neutrino is hard since it doesn’t interact easily with matter and can travel unaffected great distances through the universe. Neutrinos are passing through you right now and you can’t even feel a thing!

The neat thing about this discovery — and multimessenger astronomy in general — is how much more we can learn by combining observations. This blazar/neutrino connection, for example, tells us that it was protons being accelerated by the blazar’s jet. Our study of blazars, neutrinos, and other objects and events in the universe will continue with many more exciting multimessenger discoveries to come in the future.

Want to know more? Read the story HERE.

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We’re Upgrading Our X-ray Vision!

Think X-ray vision is a superpower found only in comics and movies? Unlike Superman and Supergirl, NASA has it for real, thanks to the X-ray observatories we’ve sent into orbit.

Now the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer – IXPE for short – has shot into space to enhance our superpower!

Meet IXPE

When dentists take X-ray pictures of a tooth, they use a machine that makes X-rays and captures them on a device placed on the opposite side. But X-rays also occur naturally. In astronomy, we observe X-rays made by distant objects to learn more about them.

IXPE will improve astronomers’ knowledge about some of these objects, like black holes, neutron stars, and the expanding clouds made by supernova explosions.

That’s because it will capture a piece of information about X-ray light that has only rarely been measured from space!

X-ray astronomers have learned a lot about the cosmos by measuring three properties of light – when it arrives, where it’s coming from, and what energies it has (think: colors). Picture these characteristics as making up three of the four sides of a pyramid. The missing piece is a property called polarization.

Polarization tells us how organized light is. This gives astronomers additional clues about how the X-rays were made and what matter they’ve passed through on their way to us. IXPE will explore this previously hidden side of cosmic X-ray sources.

What is polarization?

All light, from microwaves to gamma rays, is made from pairs of waves traveling together – one carrying electricity and the other magnetism. These two waves always vibrate at right angles (90°) to each other, with their peaks and valleys in sync, and they also vibrate at right angles to their direction of motion.

To keep things simple, we’ll illustrate only one of these waves – the one carrying electricity. If we could zoom into a typical beam of light, we’d see something like the animation above. It’s a mess, with all the wave peaks pointing in random directions.

When light interacts with matter, it can become better organized. Its electric field can vibrate in a way that keeps all the wave crests pointing in the same direction, as shown above. This is polarized light.

The amount and type of polarization we detect in light tell us more about its origin, as well as any matter it interacted with before reaching us.

Let’s look at the kinds of objects IXPE will study and what it may tell us about them.

Exploring star wrecks

Exploded stars create vast, rapidly expanding clouds called supernova remnants – like the Jellyfish Nebula above. It formed 4,000 years ago, but even today, the remnant’s heart can tell us about the extreme conditions following the star’s explosion.

X-rays give us a glimpse of the powerful processes at work during and after these explosions. IXPE will map remnants like this, revealing how X-rays are polarized across the entire object. This will help us better understand how these celestial cataclysms take place and evolve.

Magnifying supermagnets

Some supernovae leave behind neutron stars. They form when the core of a massive star collapses, squeezing more than our Sun’s mass into a ball only as wide as a city.

The collapse greatly ramps up their spin. Some neutron stars rotate hundreds of times a second! Their magnetic fields also get a tremendous boost, becoming trillions of times stronger than Earth’s. One type, called a magnetar, boasts the strongest magnetic fields known – a thousand times stronger than typical neutron stars.

These superdense, superspinning supermagnets frequently erupt in powerful outbursts (illustrated above) that emit lots of X-rays. IXPE will tell astronomers more about these eruptions and the extreme magnetic fields that help drive them.

Closing in on black holes

Black holes can form when massive stars collapse or when neutron stars crash together. Matter falling toward a black hole quickly settles into a hot, flat structure called an accretion disk. The disk’s inner edge gradually drains into the black hole. Notice how odd the disk appears from certain angles? This happens because the black hole’s extreme gravity distorts the path of light coming from the disk’s far side.

X-rays near the black hole can bounce off the disk before heading to our telescopes, and this polarizes the light. What’s exciting is that the light is polarized differently across the disk. The differences depend both on the energies of the X-rays and on what parts of the disk they strike. IXPE observations will provide astronomers with a detailed picture of what’s happening around black holes in our galaxy that can’t be captured in any other way.

By tracking how X-ray light is organized, IXPE will add a previously unseen dimension to our X-ray vision. It’s a major upgrade that will give astronomers a whole new perspective on some of the most intriguing objects in the universe.

Keep up with what’s happening in the universe and how we study it by following NASA Universe on Twitter and Facebook.

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Take a good look: this is the black hole at the center of our galaxy.

In the inset image, gas in the glowing orange ring surrounds the black hole's event horizon, a boundary from which nothing can escape. The ring is created by light bending in the intense gravity around Sagittarius A*, which has a mass some four million times greater than our Sun. This groundbreaking image of Sagittarius A* was taken by the Event Horizon Telescope team with data from telescopes around the world. After the EHT's iconic image of M87*, released in 2019, this is only the second time a supermassive black hole has been directly observed with its shadow.

The wider look at the space around Sagittarius A* includes data contributed by several NASA missions. The orange specks and purple tendrils were captured in infrared light by the Hubble Space Telescope, and the blue clouds represent data from our orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Fall in to the whole story: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/images/sagittarius-a-nasa-telescopes-support-event-horizon-telescope-in-studying-milky-ways.html

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CREDIT: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; IR: NASA/HST/STScI. Inset: Radio (EHT Collaboration)

InSight Mission to Mars

Our InSight mission will place a fixed science outpost on Mars to study its deep interior. Findings and research from this project will address one of the most fundamental questions we have about planetary and solar system science – How in the world did these rocky planets form?

By investigating the interior structure and processes of Mars, the InSight mission will gain a better understanding of the evolutionary formation of planets, including Earth.

InSight will record Mars’ vital signs to learn more about the planet, including:

Seismic Activity:

A seismometer will be used to record the seismic activity on Mars. This will give us information on the crust, mantel and core; and the relationship between them.

Temperature:

A heat flow probe will be used to take Mars’ temperature and determine the change over the course of a full Martian year.

Reflexes:

By looking at how the rotation of Mars wobbles, we will better understand what the core size may be and its composition.

Launch for the InSight mission is scheduled for March 2016, and even though you can’t physically travel with the lander, you can send your name to the Red Planet onboard. Make sure to submit your name before Sept. 8!

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What's your favorite part of the job?

Hey, Kate! What would you say/what advice would you give to your younger self? ✨

That’s a wrap! Thank you all so much for your awesome questions! 

If you’re looking for other ways to enjoy #EarthDayatHome, check out this feature: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/earthdayathome-with-nasa/

Don’t forget to follow NASA Earth on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

You can follow Sandra Cauffman on Twitter, HERE. 

You can follow Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen “Dr. Z” on Twitter, HERE. 

Happy Earth Day!