Rare Full Moon On Christmas Day

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!

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

First All-Woman Spacewalk

NASA astronauts and best friends, Christina Koch and Jessica Meir, made history Friday, October 18, 2019, by conducting the first all-woman spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS)! The Expedition 61 flight engineers ventured into the vacuum of space at 7:38 a.m. EDT to swap out a failed power controller that regulates the batteries used to collect and distribute power to the orbital laboratory – a task that took a total of seven hours and 17 minutes to complete.

This was Koch’s fourth spacewalk and Meir’s first. Both women, selected as astronaut candidates in 2013, are on their first trip to work and live aboard the space station. Meir will be the 15th woman to spacewalk, and the 14th U.S. woman.

Get to know the astronauts

In addition to being an astronaut, Christina Koch is an engineer and physicist. Her career has taken her to extreme parts of the planet to conduct scientific field missions in places like the Antarctic South Pole and Greenland’s Summit Station. Prior to being selected as an astronaut candidate in 2013, she worked as an Electrical Engineer at our Goddard Space Flight Center’s Laboratory for High Energy Astrophysics.

Koch left Earth on March 14, 2019, and is slated to set a record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman with an expected total of 328 days in space. Her extended mission will provide researchers the opportunity to observe the effects of long-duration spaceflight on a female body in preparation for human missions to the Moon and Mars.

Jessica Meir dreamed of the day she would make it to space since the age of five. That dream became a reality on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2019 as she left Earth on her first spaceflight – later floating into her new home aboard the International Space Station.

While Meir’s new home is more than 200 miles over the Earth, she is no stranger to extreme environments. She studied penguins in Antarctica and mapped caves in Italy  –  both of which prepared her for the ultimate extreme environment: space.

#AllWomanSpacewalk, what’s the deal?

The all-woman spacewalk wasn’t something we purposefully planned; it is a testament to the increasing number of female astronauts in the space program. For example, Koch’s and Meir’s 2013 class of astronaut candidates was 50 percent women!

When asked in an interview about the importance of conducting her mission and this spacewalk, Koch said,  

“In the end, I do think it’s important, and I think it’s important because of the historical nature of what we’re doing. In the past women haven’t always been at the table. It’s wonderful to be contributing to the space program at a time when all contributions are being accepted, when everyone has a role. That can lead in turn to increased chance for success. There are a lot of people who derive motivation from inspiring stories of people who look like them, and I think it’s an important story to tell.” 

It’s important to note that spacewalks are not easy; astronauts typically describe them as the most physically challenging thing they do. Assignments are made on the basis of which astronauts are the best prepared to accomplish the tasks at hand under the conditions at the time. Today, Koch and Meir were the top astronauts for the job.

Women are no stranger to spacewalks!

While this was the first spacewalk to be conducted entirely by women, women are no strangers to spacewalks. Exactly 35 years and one week ago, Kathryn Sullivan (pictured above) made her own historic debut as the first U.S. woman to conduct a spacewalk. Since then, a total of 14 women (15 including Jessica) have ventured into the vacuum of space on 40 different spacewalks. Former Astronaut Peggy Whitson performed a record number of 10! From Astronauts to mission directors, women have been making their mark at the agency for decades now. A few of our recent pioneers are:

Astronaut Kate Rubins: First person to sequence DNA in space

Astronaut Peggy Whitson: First woman to command the ISS

Sandra Cauffman: Director of our Earth Science’s Division

Nicola Fox: Director of our Heliophysics Division

Lori Glaze: Director of our Planetary Science Division

Coming soon: The first woman to walk on the Moon

The first all-woman spacewalk is a milestone worth noting and celebrating as we look forward to putting the first woman and the next man on the Moon by 2024 with our Artemis lunar exploration program. With today’s historic event, we once again set a precedence for women to lead in space exploration.

We hope achievements such as this provide inspiration to you all around the world, proving that hard work can lead you to great heights. This is not just a historic day for NASA, but a moment we can all feel proud of.

Didn’t have time to tune in? Check out the replay, here. Koch was wearing the spacesuit with red stripes, while Meir’s had no stripes.

If you’d like to keep up with Christian Koch and Jessica Meir’s work 254 miles above planet Earth, follow them on Twitter at @Astro_ Christina and @Astro_Jessica. 

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

A Total Solar Eclipse Over South America

On Dec. 14, 2020, a total solar eclipse will pass over Chile and Argentina.

Solar eclipses happen when the Moon lines up just right between the Sun and Earth, allowing it to cast its shadow on Earth’s surface. People within the outer part of the Moon’s shadow will see the Sun partially blocked by the Moon, and those in the inner part of the shadow will see a total solar eclipse.

The Moon’s orbit around Earth is slightly tilted, meaning this alignment doesn’t happen on every orbit. Total solar eclipses happen somewhere on Earth about once every 18 months.

During a total solar eclipse, the Moon blocks out the Sun’s bright face, revealing its comparatively faint outer atmosphere, the corona. This provides Sun-watchers and scientists alike with a rare chance to see the solar corona closer to the Sun’s surface than is usually possible.

Scientists can take advantage of this unparalleled view — and solar eclipses’ unique effects on Earth’s atmosphere — to perform unique scientific studies on the Sun and its effects on Earth. Several NASA-funded science teams performed such studies during the total solar eclipse in the United States on Aug. 21, 2017. Read about what they’ve learned so far.

Watching the eclipse

We’ll be carrying images of December’s eclipse — courtesy of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile — on NASA TV and on the agency’s website starting at 9:40 a.m. EST on Dec. 14.

We’ll also have a live show in Spanish from 10:30 – 11:30 a.m. EST featuring views of the eclipse and NASA scientists.

If you’re observing the eclipse in person, remember that it’s never safe to look directly at the uneclipsed or partially eclipsed Sun. You can use special solar viewing glasses (NOT sunglasses) or an indirect method like pinhole projection to watch the eclipse in person.

For people in the path of totality, there will be a few brief moments when it is safe to look directly at the eclipse. Only once the Moon has completely covered the Sun and there is no sunlight shining is it safe to look at the eclipse. Make sure you put your eclipse glasses back on or return to indirect viewing before the first flash of sunlight appears around the Moon’s edge.

Mira el eclipse en vivo comentado por científicas de la NASA de 10:30 a 11:30 a.m. EST el 14 de diciembre en NASA TV y la página web de la agencia. Lee más sobre el eclipse y cómo observarlo de forma segura aquí: https://ciencia.nasa.gov/eclipse-de-2020-en-america-del-sur Y sigue a NASA en español en Instagram, Twitter, YouTube y Facebook.

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

The Search for Starless Planets

While it’s familiar to us, our solar system may actually be a bit of an oddball. Our Milky Way galaxy is home to gigantic worlds with teeny-tiny orbits and planets that circle pairs of stars. We’ve even found planets that don’t orbit stars at all! Instead, they drift through the galaxy completely alone (unless they have a moon to keep them company). These lonely island worlds are called rogue planets.

Where do rogue planets come from?

The planet-building process can be pretty messy. Dust and gas around a star clump together to form larger and larger objects, like using a piece of play-dough to pick up other pieces.

Sometimes collisions and close encounters can fling a planet clear out of the gravitational grip of its parent star. Rogue planets may also form out in space on their own, like the way stars grow.

Seeing the invisible

We’ve discovered more than 4,000 exoplanets, but only a handful are rogue planets. That’s because they’re superhard to find! Rogue planets are almost completely invisible to us because they don’t shine like stars and space is inky black. It’s like looking for a black cat in a dark room without a flashlight.

Some planet-finding methods involve watching to see how orbiting planets affect their host star, but that doesn’t work for rogue planets because they’re off by themselves. Rogue planets are usually pretty cold too, so infrared telescopes can’t use their heat vision to spot them either.

So how can we find them? Astronomers use a cool cosmic quirk to detect them by their effect on starlight. When a rogue planet lines up with a more distant star from our vantage point, the planet bends and magnifies light from the star. This phenomenon, called microlensing, looks something like this:

Imagine you have a trampoline, a golf ball, and an invisible bowling ball. If you put the bowling ball on the trampoline, you could see how it made a dent in the fabric even if you couldn’t see the ball directly. And if you rolled the golf ball near it, it would change the golf ball’s path.

A rogue planet affects space the way the bowling ball warps the trampoline. When light from a distant star passes by a rogue planet, it curves around the invisible world (like how it curves around the star in the animation above). If astronomers on Earth were watching the star, they’d notice it briefly brighten. The shape and duration of this brightness spike lets them know a planet is there, even though they can’t see it.

Telescopes on the ground have to look through Earth’s turbulent atmosphere to search for rogue planets. But when our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches in the mid-2020s, it will give us a much better view of distant stars and rogue planets because it will be located way above Earth’s atmosphere — even higher than the Moon!

Other space telescopes would have to be really lucky to spot these one-in-a-million microlensing signals. But Roman will watch huge patches of the sky for months to catch these fleeting events.

Lessons from cosmic castaways

Scientists have come up with different models to explain how different planetary systems form and change over time, but we still don’t know which ones are right. The models make different predictions about rogue planets, so studying these isolated worlds can help us figure out which models work best.

When Roman spots little microlensing starlight blips, astronomers will be able to get a pretty good idea of the mass of the object that caused the signal from how long the blip lasts. Scientists expect the mission to detect hundreds of rogue planets that are as small as rocky Mars — about half the size of Earth — up to ones as big as gas giants, like Jupiter and Saturn.

By design, Roman is only going to search a small slice of the Milky Way for rogue planets. Scientists have come up with clever ways to use Roman’s future data to estimate how many rogue planets there are in the whole galaxy. This information will help us better understand whether our solar system is pretty normal or a bit of an oddball compared to the rest of our galaxy.

Roman will have such a wide field of view that it will be like going from looking at the cosmos through a peephole to looking through a floor-to-ceiling window. The mission will help us learn about all kinds of other cool things in addition to rogue planets, like dark energy and dark matter, that will help us understand much more about our place in space.

Learn more about the Roman Space Telescope at: https://roman.gsfc.nasa.gov/

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What is the most interesting fact that you discovered about Black Holes? And what is the one you would most want to find out?

This unprocessed image shows features in Saturn's atmosphere from closer than ever before. The view was captured by our Cassini spacecraft during its first Grand Finale dive between the planet and its rings on April 26, 2017.

As Cassini dove through the gap, it came within about 1,900 miles (3,000 kilometers) of Saturn's cloud tops (where the air pressure is 1 bar -- comparable to the atmospheric pressure of Earth at sea level) and within about 200 miles (300 kilometers) of the innermost visible edge of the rings.

See all the unprocessed images from Cassini: https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/raw-images/ 

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

Solar System: Things to Know This Week

Our social media accounts will help you explore our world, the solar system and beyond.

1. The Flagship Fleet

Start with our flagship accounts, where you can keep up with all the latest news and be a part of the conversation.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/nasa

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NASA/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nasa/

Tumblr: http://nasa.tumblr.com/

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/nasa/

2. Your Galactic Neighborhood 

 Follow our Planetary Science Division to keep up with all the hardworking robots exploring the wild frontiers of our solar system.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NASASolarSystem

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nasasolarsystem

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nasasolarsystem/

3. Mission Space

From the sun to Pluto and points in between, many NASA missions share their science on a variety of social platforms.

Twitter: https://www.nasa.gov/socialmedia#missions

4. NASA’s History

Need some nostalgia in your feed? Learn the history of our exploration of our home planet, our solar system and beyond.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NASAhistory

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NASAHistoryOffice

5. Kids in Space

Find fun stuff for kids, parents and anyone who likes space and Earth science, including games, hands-on projects and fun facts.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/nasaspaceplace

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nasaspaceplace

6. The Big Picture

Our photographers take their cameras to some interesting places around the planet. 

Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasahqphoto/

7. Star Watch

This is a great way to follow our missions that study the sun, Earth and space itself as elements of a interconnected system.

Twitter https://twitter.com/NASASunEarth

8. NASA People

Want to know what it's like to work for us? Learn about the science and adventures of astronauts, scientists and engineers exploring space.

View the List: https://www.nasa.gov/socialmedia#people

9. NASA Earth

Our planet is changing, and NASA Earth is on it, using the vantage point of space to increase our understanding of Earth and improve lives.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/nasaearth

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nasaearth

10. Craving More?

Visit us at: https://www.nasa.gov/socialmedia

 for a listing of the agency’s current social media accounts. 

Discover more lists of 10 things to know about our solar system HERE.

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Global Temperature by the Numbers

The Year

4th Hottest

2018 was the fourth hottest year since modern recordkeeping began. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration work together to track temperatures around the world and study how they change from year to year. For decades, the overall global temperature has been increasing.

Over the long term, world temperatures are warming, but each individual year is affected by things like El Niño ocean patterns and specific weather events.

1.5 degrees

Globally, Earth’s temperature was more than 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the average from 1951 to 1980.

The Record

139 years

Since 1880, we can put together a consistent record of temperatures around the planet and see that it was much colder in the late-19th century. Before 1880, uncertainties in tracking global temperatures were too large. Temperatures have increased even faster since the 1970s, the result of increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Five Hottest

The last five years have been the hottest in the modern record.

6,300 Individual Observations

Scientists from NASA use data from 6,300 weather stations and Antarctic research stations, together with ship- and buoy-based observations of sea surface temperatures to track global temperatures.

The Consequences

605,830 swimming pools

As the planet warms, polar ice is melting at an accelerated rate. The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets lost about 605,830 Olympic swimming pools (400 billion gallons) of water between 1993 and 2016.

8 inches

Melting ice raises sea levels around the world. While ice melts into the ocean, heat also causes the water to expand. Since 1880, sea levels around the world have risen approximately 8 inches.

71,189 acres burned

One symptom of the warmer climate is that fire seasons burn hotter and longer. In 2018, wildfires burned more than 71,189 acres in the U.S. alone.

46% increase in CO2 levels

CO2 levels have increased 46 percent since the late 19th Century, which is a dominant factor causing global warming.

Eclipse Across America

August 21, 2017, the United States experienced a solar eclipse! 

An eclipse occurs when the Moon temporarily blocks the light from the Sun. Within the narrow, 60- to 70-mile-wide band stretching from Oregon to South Carolina called the path of totality, the Moon completely blocked out the Sun’s face; elsewhere in North America, the Moon covered only a part of the star, leaving a crescent-shaped Sun visible in the sky.

During this exciting event, we were collecting your images and reactions online. 

Here are a few images of this celestial event...take a look:

This composite image, made from 4 frames, shows the International Space Station, with a crew of six onboard, as it transits the Sun at roughly five miles per second during a partial solar eclipse from, Northern Cascades National Park in Washington. Onboard as part of Expedition 52 are: NASA astronauts Peggy Whitson, Jack Fischer, and Randy Bresnik; Russian cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Sergey Ryazanskiy; and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Paolo Nespoli.

Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

The Bailey's Beads effect is seen as the moon makes its final move over the sun during the total solar eclipse on Monday, August 21, 2017 above Madras, Oregon.

Credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani

This image from one of our Twitter followers shows the eclipse through tree leaves as crescent shaped shadows from Seattle, WA.

Credit: Logan Johnson

“The eclipse in the palm of my hand”. The eclipse is seen here through an indirect method, known as a pinhole projector, by one of our followers on social media from Arlington, TX.

Credit: Mark Schnyder

Through the lens on a pair of solar filter glasses, a social media follower captures the partial eclipse from Norridgewock, ME.

Credit: Mikayla Chase

While most of us watched the eclipse from Earth, six humans had the opportunity to view the event from 250 miles above on the International Space Station. European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Paolo Nespoli captured this image of the Moon’s shadow crossing America.

Credit: Paolo Nespoli

This composite image shows the progression of a partial solar eclipse over Ross Lake, in Northern Cascades National Park, Washington. The beautiful series of the partially eclipsed sun shows the full spectrum of the event. 

Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

In this video captured at 1,500 frames per second with a high-speed camera, the International Space Station, with a crew of six onboard, is seen in silhouette as it transits the sun at roughly five miles per second during a partial solar eclipse, Monday, Aug. 21, 2017 near Banner, Wyoming.

Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

To see more images from our NASA photographers, visit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasahqphoto/albums/72157685363271303

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

Voyager: The Golden Record

It’s the 1970s, and we’re about to send two spacecraft (Voyager 1 & 2) into space. These two spacecraft will eventually leave our solar system and become the most distant man-made objects…ever. How can we leave our mark on them in the case that other spacefarers find them in the distant future?

The Golden Record.

We placed an ambitious message aboard Voyager 1 and 2, a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.

The Golden Record Cover

The outward facing cover of the golden record carries instructions in case it is ever found. Detailing to its discoverers how to decipher its meaning.

In the upper left-hand corner is an easily recognized drawing of the phonograph record and the stylus carried with it. The stylus is in the correct position to play the record from the beginning. Written around it in binary arithmetic is the correct time of one rotation of the record. The drawing indicates that the record should be played from the outside in.

The information in the upper right-hand portion of the cover is designed to show how the pictures contained on the record are to be constructed from the recorded signals. The top drawing shows the typical signal that occurs at the start of the picture. The picture is made from this signal, which traces the picture as a series of vertical lines, similar to ordinary television. Immediately below shows how these lines are to be drawn vertically, with staggered “interlace” to give the correct picture rendition. Below that is a drawing of an entire picture raster, showing that there are 52 vertical lines in a complete picture.

Immediately below this is a replica of the first picture on the record to permit the recipients to verify that they are decoding the signals correctly. A circle was used in this picture to ensure that the recipients use the correct ratio of horizontal to vertical height in picture reconstruction.

The drawing in the lower left-hand corner of the cover is the pulsar map previously sent as part of the plaques on Pioneers 10 and 11. It shows the location of the solar system with respect to 14 pulsars, whose precise periods are given.

The drawing containing two circles in the lower right-hand corner is a drawing of the hydrogen atom in its two lowest states, with a connecting line and digit 1 to indicate that the time interval associated with the transition from one state to the other is to be used as the fundamental time scale, both for the time given on the cover and in the decoded pictures.

The Contents

The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University and his associates. 

They assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales and other animals. To this, they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Carter and U.N. Secretary General Waldheim.

Listen to some of the sounds of the Golden Record on our Soundcloud page:

Golden Record: Greetings to the Universe

Golden Record: Sounds of Earth

Songs from Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony are included on the golden record. For a complete list of songs, visit: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-on-the-record/music/

The 115 images included on the record, encoded in analog form, range from mathematical definitions to humans from around the globe. See the images here: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-on-the-record/images/

Making the Golden Record

Many people were instrumental in the design, development and manufacturing of the golden record. 

Blank records were provided by the Pyral S.A. of Creteil, France. CBS Records contracted the JVC Cutting Center in Boulder, CO to cut the lacquer masters which were then sent to the James G. Lee Record Processing center in Gardena, CA to cut and gold plate eight Voyager records.

The record is constructed of gold-plated copper and is 12 inches in diameter. The record’s cover is aluminum and electroplated upon it is an ultra-pure sample of the isotope uranium-238. Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.468 billion years.

Learn more about the golden record HERE.

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