Thanks for riding along these past few weeks as we 'voyaged' back in time and celebrated 45 years of Voyager! For the rest of time, the Voyagers will continue orbiting around the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, with our sun but a tiny point of light among many.✨
Photo 1: Voyager Encapsulation - The Voyager 2 spacecraft, which was the first of the two Voyagers to launch, is seen at the Spacecraft Assembly and Encapsulation Facility-1 at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The spacecraft was put into this shroud on August 2, 1977, to protect it during flight through the atmosphere.
Photo 2: Mementos of Earth – as the two Voyager spacecraft travel out into deep space, they carry a small American flag and a Golden Record packed with pictures and sounds – mementos of our home planet. This picture shows John Casani, Voyager project manager in 1977.
Photo 3: Voyager 1’s 8-track digital tape recorder
Photo 4: Jupiter’s Great Red Spot – Taken by Voyager 1 from a distance of 2.7 million miles (4.3 million kilometers). The great red spot is three times as large as Earth!
Photo 5: Saturn and three moons taken by Voyager 2
Photo 6: Farewell shot of crescent of Uranus taken by Voyager 2
Photo 7: Detail of Neptune’s rings - This wide-angle Voyager 2 image, taken through the camera's clear filter, is the first to show Neptune's rings in detail.
Photo 8: Earth as ‘Pale Blue Dot’ - part of the first ever 'portrait' of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. From Voyager's great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera.
#Voyager#Voyager1#Voyager2#InterstellarSpace#NASA#JPL#Exploration#Space#Spacecraft#spacephotos
A tarantula was caught in @nasawebb 🕸️
This stellar nursery called 30 Doradus - and nicknamed the Tarantula Nebula - is 161,000 light-years away from our Milky Way galaxy. It's home to the hottest, most massive stars known and has been a favorite for astronomers studying star formation.
Astronomers with the Webb team focused three of the space telescope’s high-resolution infrared instruments on the nebula, which provided stunning photos. MIRI, the Mid-infrared instrument managed here at JPL, captured protostars nestled deep in the clouds of gas and dust, with some still gathering mass. The image above shows MIRI’s image, which is focused on the central star cluster.
The Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) shows the nebula’s cavity (at the center of the second image) that has been hollowed out by blistering radiation from a cluster of massive young stars, which sparkle a pale blue.
Despite humanity’s thousands of years of stargazing, the star-formation process still holds many mysteries – many of them due to our previous inability to get crisp images of what was happening behind the thick clouds of stellar nurseries. Webb has already begun revealing a universe never seen before and is only getting started on rewriting the stellar creation story.
#JWST#JamesWebbSpaceTelescope#Webb#galaxy#StarFormation#stars#protostars#science#space#data#NASA#JPL
Hello, September skies! 🤩
This month will feature Mars high in the south before sunrise, a prime time to view Jupiter, and the equinox.
Grab a pair of binoculars when you take a look at Jupiter, which will be visible under clear night skies. With the help of the binoculars, you can see the gas giant’s four large moons as little starlike points of light.
Then Sept. 23 is the equinox, which marks the start of fall in the Northern Hemisphere and spring in the Southern Hemisphere.
Head to our link in bio for more skywatching tips: go.nasa.gov/3zLnOgh
#Mars#Jupiter#SolarSystem#skywatching#sky#planets#NASA#JPL
Engineers have repaired an issue affecting telemetry data from NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft.
Earlier this year, the probe’s attitude articulation and control (AACS) system, which keeps Voyager 1’s antenna pointed at Earth, began sending garbled information to mission controllers despite operating normally. The team identified the source of the glitch – data was being routed through an onboard computer that stopped working years ago – and corrected it but continue to investigate the root cause.
For now, both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 continue their exploration of the space between the stars.
As we continue to celebrate the Voyagers’ 45th anniversary, join mission team members for a live Q&A today on YouTube and Facebook at 12:15pm PT / 3:15pm ET / 7:15pm UTC.
#Voyager#Voyager1#SpaceExploration#InterstellarSpace#Engineering#History#NASA#JPL
The Voyager spacecraft are 45!
Mission members and those within the JPL community are in awe of what @nasa’s longest and furthest explorers are still accomplishing.
Another first for @nasawebb ✨
The space telescope captured the first clear evidence of carbon dioxide in a planet’s atmosphere outside of our solar system, ushering in a new era of exoplanet science.
This observation provides important information about the composition and formation of the planet. It also offers evidence that, in the future, Webb may be able to detect and measure CO2 in the thinner atmospheres of smaller, rocky planets.
The planet Webb analyzed - and that's shown above in an illustration - is known as WASP-39 b. It's a hot gas giant with a mass roughly the same as Saturn and a diameter 1.3 times greater than Jupiter’s. The planet’s extreme puffiness is related in part to its high temperature (about 1,600º Fahrenheit, or 900º Celsius). Previous observations from other space telescopes revealed the presence of water vapor, sodium, and potassium in WASP-39 b’s atmosphere.
#Webb#exoplanets#universe#CarbonDioxide#science#research#data#NASA#JPL
A new discovery in Jezero Crater.
Since arriving at a portion of the ancient delta in early spring, the Perseverance rover has been examining rocks. With the help of its rock-vaporizing laser and ground-penetrating radar, the science team has found that the crater’s floor is made up of volcanic rock, or igneous rock.
This area of Jezero Crater has been of particular interest to the rover’s science team because sedimentary rocks often form in watery environments suitable for life, and some are known to preserve signs of ancient microscopic life.
But determining the age of sedimentary rocks can be challenging, particularly when they contain fragments that formed at different times before sediment was deposited. In contrast, volcanic rocks are excellent timekeepers because crystals within them record details about the precise moment they formed. This can help the science team better determine when water was present in Jezero Crater.
#Mars#SolarSystem#Perseverance#MarsRover#OMGRobots#science#geology#NASA#JPL
‘Pin’nacle moments!
As we celebrate Voyager’s 45 years of exploration, these commemorative pins have us time traveling through all of Voyager’s stellar achievements, including their first flybys of outer planets Neptune, Uranus, and Saturn 🪐!
Which is your favorite?
#Voyager#Space#NASA#JPL#SolarSystem#Interstellar#Exploration#Neptune#Uranus#Saturn
The universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, and scientists don’t know why. 🤔
Dark Energy Survey scientists search galaxy images for more subtle distortions due to dark matter bending space, an effect called weak gravitational lensing. The strength of gravity determines the size and distribution of dark matter structures, and the size and distribution in turn determine how warped those galaxies appear to us – you might have seen this recently in the images from the James Webb telescope!
That’s how images can reveal the strength of gravity at different distances from Earth and distant times throughout the universe’s history. The group has now measured the shapes of over 100 million galaxies, and so far, the observations match what’s predicted by Einstein’s theory.
The groundwork laid by the Dark Energy Survey will feed into two upcoming missions: the ESA (European Space Agency) Euclid mission, slated for launch no earlier than 2023, and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, slated for no later than May 2027. Both will search for changes in the strength of gravity over time or distance. Like the Dark Energy Survey, Euclid and Roman will search for only subtle changes – ones too small to affect, say, the motion of the planets in our solar system but still significant enough to affect the distribution of matter throughout the universe over billions of years.
📸: James Webb telescope
#NASA#Gravity#DarkEnergy#DarkMatter#Einstein#Universe#JamesWebbSpaceTelescope#JWST#Telescope#Galaxies
As kids head #BackToSchool, they may be asking: When will I ever use what I'm learning in real life? 🤔
Jordyn wants to know when she'll ever need to use physics, chemistry, and math. Planetary Scientist Thomas Statler explains how he uses physics, chemistry, and math to help keep our planet safe. 💪 🌎 #NASA#STEM#NASAJPL#BackToSchool
Six small satellites (SmallSats) will form the largest radio telescope ever launched. SunRISE, the Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment, is an upcoming @nasa mission aimed at using the SmallSats to track hazardous and explosive space weather phenomena as shown in the animation above. These events generate particle radiation that can jeopardize astronauts, technology in space, and negatively impact communications and power grids on Earth.
The first of these six SmallSats has been completed at Utah State University Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, which is contracted to build, test, and commission all six satellites for NASA.
Each toaster-size satellite will act as a single antenna to detect bursts of radio waves from the Sun’s atmosphere. Each is equipped with four telescoping antenna booms that extend about 10 feet (2.5 meters) to form an “X,” that will orbit Earth from about 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers) away, swarming together to trace out the virtual radio telescope.
#Earth#Sun#science#technology#space#SolarSystem#telescope#NASA#JPL
A new Earth science mission has arrived at the @iss 🌏
After a successful launch on Thursday, the SpaceX Dragon autonomously docked with the International Space Station at 8:21am PT (11:21am ET) this morning.
One of the science experiments onboard is EMIT (or the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation), which was developed at JPL. The instrument will use @NASA imaging spectroscopy technology to map dust-producing regions to study how airborne mineral dust might affect our planet’s climate.
#EMIT#EarthScience#ClimateResearch#ClimateScience#ClimateChange#Spectroscopy#Technology#ISS#InternationalSpaceStation#SpaceX#NASA#JPL