Space snapshot

Anchored to a Canadarm2 mobile foot restraint, NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman uses a still camera during a May 17 spacewalk at the International Space Station. Spacewalkers replaced six batteries on the station, installed a spare communication antenna and added a spare parts platform to the station's exterior.

NASA TV Streaming Now Available On iPhone And iPad

If you are into space and have an iPad, iPhone, iPod touch or any HTML5/H.264-compatible device, you got lucky: Now you can watch NASA TV in real time. The quality is quite good, as you can see in this capture:

Now I will be able to watch shuttle launches whenever I’m in the bathroom, live. Every single one of the two of them left. But don’t worry: American manned space exploration may be dead but I’m sure that at one point they will replace the shuttle launches with stock footage and Apollo XIII reruns.

Backwards Black Holes Might Make Bigger Jets

This artist's concept shows a galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its core. The black hole is shooting out jets of radio waves.Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltec

PASADENA, Calif. – Going against the grain may turn out to be a powerful move for black holes. New research suggests supermassive black holes that spin backwards might produce more ferocious jets of gas. The results have broad implications for how galaxies change over time.

"A lot of what happens in an entire galaxy depends on what's going on in the miniscule central region where the black hole lies," said theoretical astrophysicist David Garofalo of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Garofalo is lead author of a new paper that appeared online May 27 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Other authors are Daniel A. Evans of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass., and Rita M. Sambruna of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Black holes are immense distortions of space and time with gravity that is so great, even light itself cannot escape. Astronomers have known for more than a decade that all galaxies, including our own Milky Way, are anchored by tremendous, so-called supermassive black holes, containing billions of suns' worth of mass. The black holes are surrounded and nourished by disks of gas and dust, called accretion disks. Powerful jets stream out from below and above the disks like lasers, and fierce winds blow off from the disks themselves.

The black holes can spin either in the same direction as the disks, called prograde black holes, or against the flow – the retrograde black holes. For decades, astronomers thought that the faster the spin of the black hole, the more powerful the jet. But there were problems with this "spin paradigm" model. For example, some prograde black holes had been found with no jets.

Garofalo and his colleagues have been busy flipping the model on its head. In previous papers, they proposed that the backward, or retrograde, black holes spew the most powerful jets, while the prograde black holes have weaker or no jets.

The new study links the researchers' theory with observations of galaxies across time, or at varying distances from Earth. They looked at both "radio-loud" galaxies with jets, and "radio-quiet" ones with weak or no jets. The term "radio" comes from the fact that these particular jets shoot out beams of light mostly in the form of radio waves.

The results showed that more distant radio-loud galaxies are powered by retrograde black holes, while relatively closer radio-quiet objects have prograde black holes. According to the team, the supermassive black holes evolve over time from a retrograde to a prograde state.

"This new model also solves a paradox in the old spin paradigm," said David Meier, a theoretical astrophysicist at JPL not involved in the study. "Everything now fits nicely into place."

The scientists say that the backward black holes shoot more powerful jets because there's more space between the black hole and the inner edge of the orbiting disk. This gap provides more room for the build-up of magnetic fields, which fuel the jets, an idea known as the Reynold's conjecture after the theoretical astrophysicist Chris Reynolds of the University of Maryland, College Park.

"If you picture yourself trying to get closer to a fan, you can imagine that moving in the same rotational direction as the fan would make things easier," said Garofalo. "The same principle applies to these black holes. The material orbiting around them in a disk will get closer to the ones that are spinning in the same direction versus the ones spinning the opposite way."

Jets and winds play key roles in shaping the fate of galaxies. Some research shows that jets can slow and even prevent the formation of stars not just in a host galaxy itself, but also in other nearby galaxies.

"Jets transport huge amounts of energy to the outskirts of galaxies, displace large volumes of the intergalactic gas, and act as feedback agents between the galaxy's very center and the large-scale environment," said Sambruna. "Understanding their origin is of paramount interest in modern astrophysics."

The California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages JPL for NASA.

NASA Spacecraft Penetrates Mysteries of Martian Ice Cap

This image, combining data from two instruments aboard NASA's Mars Global Surveyor, depicts an orbital view of the north polar region of Mars. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

PASADENA, Calif. -- Data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have helped scientists solve a pair of mysteries dating back four decades and provided new information about climate change on the Red Planet.

The Shallow Radar, or SHARAD, instrument aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter revealed subsurface geology allowing scientists to reconstruct the formation of a large chasm and a series of spiral troughs on the northern ice cap of Mars. The findings appear in two papers in the May 27 issue of the journal Nature.

"SHARAD is giving us a beautifully detailed view of ice deposits, whether at the poles or buried in mid-latitudes, as they changed on Mars over the last few million years," said Rich Zurek, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

On Earth, large ice sheets are shaped mainly by ice flow. According to this latest research, other forces have shaped, and continue to shape, polar ice caps on Mars. The northern ice cap is a stack of ice and dust layers up to two miles deep, covering an area slightly larger than Texas. Analyzing radar data on a computer, scientists can peel back the layers like an onion to reveal how the ice cap evolved over time.

One of the most distinctive features of the northern ice cap is Chasma Boreale, a canyon about as long as Earth's Grand Canyon but deeper and wider. Some scientists believe Chasma Boreale was created when volcanic heat melted the bottom of the ice sheet and triggered a catastrophic flood. Others suggest strong polar winds carved the canyon out of a dome of ice.

Other enigmatic features of the ice cap are troughs that spiral outward from the center like a gigantic pinwheel. Since the troughs were discovered in 1972, scientists have proposed several hypotheses about how they formed. Perhaps as Mars spins, ice closer to the poles moves slower than ice farther away, causing the semi-fluid ice to crack. Perhaps, as one mathematical model suggests, increased solar heating in certain areas and lateral heat conduction could cause the troughs to assemble.

Data from Mars now points to both the canyon and spiral troughs being created and shaped primarily by wind. Rather than being cut into existing ice very recently, the features formed over millions of years as the ice sheet grew. By influencing wind patterns, the shape of underlying, older ice controlled where and how the features grew.

"Nobody realized that there would be such complex structures in the layers," said Jack Holt, of the University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics. Holt is the lead author of the paper focusing on Chasma Boreale. "The layers record a history of ice accumulation, erosion and wind transport. From that, we can recover a history of climate that's much more detailed than anybody expected."

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was launched on Aug. 12, 2005. SHARAD and the spacecraft's five other instruments began science operations in November 2006.

"These anomalous features have gone unexplained for 40 years because we have not been able to see what lies beneath the surface," said Roberto Seu, Shallow Radar team leader at the University of Rome. "It is gratifying to me that with this new instrument we can finally explain them."

The MRO mission is managed by JPL for the Mars Exploration Program at NASA's Headquarters in Washington. The Shallow Radar instrument was provided by the Italian Space Agency, and its operations are led by the InfoCom Department, University of Rome. JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif.

WISE Makes Progress on its Space Rock Catalog

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, is busy surveying the landscape of the infrared sky, building up a catalog of cosmic specimens -- everything from distant galaxies to "failed" stars, called brown dwarfs.

Closer to home, the mission is picking out an impressive collection of asteroids and comets, some known and some never seen before. Most of these hang out in the Main Belt between Mars and Jupiter, but a small number are near-Earth objects -- asteroids and comets with orbits that pass within about 48 million kilometers (30 million miles) of Earth's orbit. By studying a small sample of near-Earth objects, WISE will learn more about the population as a whole. How do their sizes differ, and how many objects are dark versus light?

"We are taking a census of a small sample of near-Earth objects to get a better idea of how they vary," said Amy Mainzer, the principal investigator of NEOWISE, a program to catalog asteroids seen with WISE.

So far, the mission has observed more than 60,000 asteroids, both Main Belt and near-Earth objects. Most were known before, but more than 11,000 are new.

"Our data pipeline is bursting with asteroids," said WISE Principal Investigator Ned Wright of UCLA. "We are discovering about a hundred a day, mostly in the Main Belt."

About 190 near-Earth asteroids have been observed to date, of which more than 50 are new discoveries. All asteroid observations are reported to the NASA-funded International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, a clearinghouse for data on all solar system bodies at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass.

"It's a really exciting time for asteroid science," said Tim Spahr, who directs the Minor Planet Center. "WISE is another tool to add to our tool belt of instruments to discover and study the asteroid population."

A network of ground-based telescopes follows up and confirms the WISE finds, including the NASA-funded University of Arizona Spacewatch and Catalina Sky Survey projects, both near Tucson, Ariz., and the NASA-funded Magdalena Ridge Observatory near Socorro, N.M.

Some of the near-Earth asteroids detected so far are visibly dark, but it's too early to say what percentage. The team needs time to properly analyze and calibrate the data. When results are ready, they will be published in a peer-reviewed journal. WISE has not found an asteroid yet that would be too dark for detection by visible-light telescopes on the ground.

"We're beginning the process of sorting through all the objects we're finding so we can learn more about their properties," said Mainzer. "How many are big or small, or light versus dark?"

WISE will also study Trojans, asteroids that run along with Jupiter in its orbit around the sun and travel in two packs -- one in front of and one behind the gas giant. It has seen more than 800, and by the end of the mission, should have observed about half of all 4,500 known Trojans. The results will address dueling theories about how the outer planets evolved.

With its infrared vision, WISE is good at many aspects of asteroid watching. First, infrared light gives a better estimate of an asteroid's size. Imagine a light, shiny rock lying next to a bigger, dark one in the sunshine. From far away, the rocks might look about the same size. That's because they reflect about the same amount of visible sunlight. But, if you pointed an infrared camera at them, you could tell the dark one is bigger. Infrared light is related to the heat radiated from the rock itself, which, in turn, is related to its size.

A second benefit of infrared is the ability to see darker asteroids. Some asteroids are blacker than coal and barely reflect any visible light. WISE can see their infrared glow. The mission isn't necessarily hunting down dark asteroids in hiding, but collecting a sample of all different types. Like a geologist collecting everything from pumice to quartz, WISE is capturing the diversity of cosmic rocks in our solar neighborhood.

In the end, WISE will provide rough size and composition profiles for hundreds of near-Earth objects, about 100 to 200 of which will be new.

WISE has also bagged about a dozen new comets to date. The icy cousins to asteroids are easy for the telescope to spot because, as the comets are warmed by the sun, gas and dust particles blow off and glow with infrared light. Many of the comets found by WISE so far are so-called long-period comets, meaning they spend billions of years circling the sun in the frigid hinterlands of our solar system, before they are shuttled into the inner, warmer parts. Others are termed short-period comets -- they spend most of their lives hanging around the space near Jupiter, occasionally veering into the space closer to the terrestrial planets. WISE's measurements of these snowy dirtballs will allow scientists to study their size, composition and density. Measurements of the comets' orbits will help explain what kicks these objects out of their original, more distant orbits and in toward the sun.

Hubble space telescope turns 20

The Hubble Space Telescope celebrates its 20th anniversary Saturday and NASA has released a new photograph from the orbiting observatory of a cosmic pillar of gas and dust piled high in the Carina Nebula galaxy.

The Hubble Space Telescope celebrates its 20th anniversary Saturday and NASA has released a new photograph from the orbiting observatory of a cosmic pillar of gas and dust piled high in the Carina Nebula galaxy.

Three light-year-tall towers of cool hydrogen laced with dust rise from the wall of the nebula, the US space agency said, in a scene that is reminiscent of Hubble’s classic “Pillars of Creation” photograph from 1995.

Hubble, named after the astronomer Edwin P Hubble (1889—1953), was launched into low—Earth orbit on April 24, 1990.

Since then, it has been sending back some of the most spectacular images of galaxies - helping scientists to place the age of the universe at 13.7 billion years, learn that black holes are at the centre of most galaxies, monitor planetary formation and discover that the universe is expanding at an ever-faster pace.

To date, Hubble has looked at over 30,000 celestial objects and amassed over a half million pictures in its archive.

In May, a revamped Hubble provided colourful images and crisper pictures of distant stars and galaxies after a servicing mission that installed new instruments and repaired broken ones that had hampered the world’s most famous telescope.

Despite its storied past, Hubble had looked set for the junk heap until the space shuttle Atlantis’ repair mission that sought to extend the telescope’s life until at least 2014, and possibly beyond.

NASA had originally decided against the maintenance mission because of the risks involved and pressures to complete International Space Station construction by the end of 2010, when the shuttle is to be retired.

But US politicians and world astronomers fought to keep alive the instrument that has expanded knowledge of space.

“Most of us humans ... will never travel physically to some of the exotic places that we see in Hubble,” said Ed Weiler, NASA associate administrator, earlier this year. “What Hubble has done is enabled our hearts, our minds, our spirits to travel throughout the solar system even billions of light years to the very beginning of time.” Hubble fans worldwide are being invited to share the ways the telescope has affected them — they can visit the “Messages to Hubble” page on http://hubblesite.org. The messages will be stored in the Hubble data archive along with the telescope’s many terabytes of science data.

’ڈسکوری آخری سفر پر روانہ‘

خلائی شٹل ڈسکوری اپنے آخری مشن کے لیے بین الاقوامی خلائی سٹیشن (آئی ایس ایس) کی طرف روانہ ہو گئی ہے۔

ڈسکوری کو فلوریڈا کے کیننڈی خلائی مرکز سے پیر کے روز مقامی وقت کے مطابق صبح چھ بجکر اکیس منٹ پر روانہ کیا گیا۔

ڈسکوری ایک کنٹینر کے ذریعے خلائی سٹیشن کے لیے ضروری سامان لے کر روانہ ہوئی۔

یاد رہے کہ اس سفر کے بعد ڈسکوری شٹلز کو خلاء میں بھیجنے کا سلسلہ بند ہو جائے گا۔

اس مشن میں خلابازؤں کو چہل قدمی کے لیے تین مواقح فراہم کیے جائیں گے جس کے دوران وہ خلائی سٹیشن کی مرمت اور دوسرے تجربات کریں گے۔

یاد رہے کہ ڈسکوری کے حالیہ ٹیسٹوں میں بے قاعدگیوں کے باوجود ناسا کے خلائی مشن کی ٹیم نے ہفتے کے روز متفقہ طور پر اس مشن کی منظوری دی۔

دوسری جانب انجینئرز کا کہنا ہے اگرچہ ڈسکوری کے ٹیسٹ میں بے قاعدگیاں سامنے آئیں مگر اِن سے اس مشن میں کوئی رکاوٹ نہیں ہو گی۔

خلائئ شٹل کے مینجر مائیک موز نے بتایا ’ہم اس مشن کے بارے میں بہت پر امید ہیں۔ ہم آئی ایس ایس کے ذریعے اپنی مرضی کے مطابق کام کر سکیں گے۔‘

خلائی شٹل کے ڈائریکٹر پیٹ نکولنکو نے بتایا ’ہر چیز بہتر حالت میں ہے۔ ہماری ٹیم صحیح طرح کام کر رہی ہے۔ ہم درست راستے کی طرف جا رہے ہیں۔‘

خلا باز رِک ماسٹرایچو اور کلے اینڈرسن گاروسکوپ نامی خلائی سٹیشن میں آنے والی فنی خرابی کو دور کرنے کی کوشش کریں گے۔

ایم پی ایل ایم کے ذریعے خلائی سٹیشن میں تقریبا سات ہزار سات سو کلو گرام کارگو مہیا کیا جائے گا۔

Weather Balloon Space Snaps Stun NASA

NASA was stunned by space photos snapped with an ordinary camera mounted on an ordinary balloon on.
Robert Harrison, an IT director from Highburton, West Yorkshire, has an unusual hobby: Using duct tape, weather balloons, and a used camera from e-Bay, he builds high-altitude balloons that snap space photos so gorgeous, they’ve caught NASA’s eye.
The method and materials behind Harrison’s feat are stunningly simple: The contraption comprises an ordinary Canon camera mounted on a weather balloon.
Using free software downloaded from the internet, Harrison reprogrammed the camera to wake up every five minutes and take eight photographs and a video before switching off for a rest.
NASA took interest in Harrison after he posted photos from his experiments online.

Spirit's Last Moves Before Winter

Embedded video from

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology