Long before totality (when the Moon is only covering part of the Sun’s face), go to a nearby tree and look in the shade of the tree’s shadow. You will see hundreds of crescent images of the partially covered Sun all over the ground! In fact, this is a safe way to view all the partial phases of the eclipse without harming your eyes. Where do all these many images come from? The gaps between the tree’s leaves act like a pinhole camera by projecting the Sun’s image on the ground.
** 2017 Total Solar Eclipse Science Briefing – video of NASA briefing on eclipse science:
During a June 21 media briefing from the Newseum in Washington, representatives from NASA, other federal agencies, and science organizations discussed the opportunity for scientific study offered by the total solar eclipse that will cross the U.S. on August 21.
** 2017 Total Solar Eclipse Safety Briefing – video of a NASA briefing on watching the eclipse safely
During a June 21 media briefing from the Newseum in Washington, representatives from NASA, other federal agencies, and science organizations provided important information about safely viewing the total solar eclipse that will cross the U.S. on August 21.
NASA’s Juno spacecraft was racing away from Jupiter following its seventh close pass of the planet when JunoCam snapped this image on May 19, 2017, from about 29,100 miles (46,900 kilometers) above the cloud tops. The spacecraft was over 65.9 degrees south latitude, with a lovely view of the south polar region of the planet.
This image was processed to enhance color differences, showing the amazing variety in Jupiter’s stormy atmosphere. The result is a surreal world of vibrant color, clarity and contrast. Four of the white oval storms known as the “String of Pearls” are visible near the top of the image. Interestingly, one orange-colored storm can be seen at the belt-zone boundary, while other storms are more of a cream color.
JunoCam’s raw images are available for the public to peruse and process into image products at: www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam
Many of the features seen in Saturn’s rings are shaped by the planet’s moons. This view from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shows two different effects of moons that cause waves in the A ring and kinks in the F ring.
The A ring, which takes up most of the image on the left side, displays waves caused by orbital resonances with moons that orbit beyond the rings. Kinks, clumps and other structures in the F ring (the small, narrow ring at right) can be caused by interactions between the ring particles and the moon Prometheus, which orbits just interior to the ring, as well as collisions between small objects within the ring itself.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 22 degrees above the ring plane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 22, 2017.
The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 63,000 miles (101,000 kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 7 degrees. Image scale is 1,979 feet (603 meters) per pixel.
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft sees bright methane clouds drifting in the summer skies of Saturn’s moon Titan, along with dark hydrocarbon lakes and seas clustered around the north pole.
Compared to earlier in Cassini’s mission, most of the surface in the moon’s northern high latitudes is now illuminated by the sun. (See here for a view of the northern hemisphere from 2007.) Summer solstice in the Saturn system occurred on May 24, 2017.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 9, 2017, using a spectral filter that preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 938 nanometers. Cassini obtained the view at a distance of about 315,000 miles (507,000 kilometers) from Titan.
The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
More exoplanet candidates have been spotted by the Kepler space observatory including 10 that are nearly the size of Earth and orbit in the habitable zone of their stars. The press release below describes the latest findings and here is a video of a NASA briefing held this morning:
NASA’s Kepler space telescope team has released a mission catalog of planet candidates that introduces 219 new planet candidates, 10 of which are near-Earth size and orbiting in their star’s habitable zone, which is the range of distance from a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of a rocky planet.
NASA’s Kepler space telescope team has identified 219 new planet candidates, 10 of which are near-Earth size and in the habitable zone of their star. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech. [Larger image]This is the most comprehensive and detailed catalog release of candidate exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system, from Kepler’s first four years of data. It’s also the final catalog from the spacecraft’s view of the patch of sky in the Cygnus constellation.
With the release of this catalog, derived from data publicly available on the NASA Exoplanet Archive, there are now 4,034 planet candidates identified by Kepler. Of which, 2,335 have been verified as exoplanets. Of roughly 50 near-Earth size habitable zone candidates detected by Kepler, more than 30 have been verified.
Additionally, results using Kepler data suggest two distinct size groupings of small planets. Both results have significant implications for the search for life. The final Kepler catalog will serve as the foundation for more study to determine the prevalence and demographics of planets in the galaxy, while the discovery of the two distinct planetary populations shows that about half the planets we know of in the galaxy either have no surface, or lie beneath a deep, crushing atmosphere – an environment unlikely to host life.
The findings were presented at a news conference Monday at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.
“The Kepler data set is unique, as it is the only one containing a population of these near Earth-analogs – planets with roughly the same size and orbit as Earth,” said Mario Perez, Kepler program scientist in the Astrophysics Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “Understanding their frequency in the galaxy will help inform the design of future NASA missions to directly image another Earth.”
The Kepler space telescope hunts for planets by detecting the minuscule drop in a star’s brightness that occurs when a planet crosses in front of it, called a transit.
This is the eighth release of the Kepler candidate catalog, gathered by reprocessing the entire set of data from Kepler’s observations during the first four years of its primary mission. This data will enable scientists to determine what planetary populations – from rocky bodies the size of Earth, to gas giants the size of Jupiter – make up the galaxy’s planetary demographics.
To ensure a lot of planets weren’t missed, the team introduced their own simulated planet transit signals into the data set and determined how many were correctly identified as planets. Then, they added data that appear to come from a planet, but were actually false signals, and checked how often the analysis mistook these for planet candidates. This work told them which types of planets were overcounted and which were undercounted by the Kepler team’s data processing methods.
“This carefully-measured catalog is the foundation for directly answering one of astronomy’s most compelling questions – how many planets like our Earth are in the galaxy?” said Susan Thompson, Kepler research scientist for the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and lead author of the catalog study.
One research group took advantage of the Kepler data to make precise measurements of thousands of planets, revealing two distinct groups of small planets. The team found a clean division in the sizes of rocky, Earth-size planets and gaseous planets smaller than Neptune. Few planets were found between those groupings.
Using the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the group measured the sizes of 1,300 stars in the Kepler field of view to determine the radii of 2,000 Kepler planets with exquisite precision.
“We like to think of this study as classifying planets in the same way that biologists identify new species of animals,” said Benjamin Fulton, doctoral candidate at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, and lead author of the second study. “Finding two distinct groups of exoplanets is like discovering mammals and lizards make up distinct branches of a family tree.”
It seems that nature commonly makes rocky planets up to about 75 percent bigger than Earth. For reasons scientists don’t yet understand, about half of those planets take on a small amount of hydrogen and helium that dramatically swells their size, allowing them to “jump the gap” and join the population closer to Neptune’s size.
The Kepler spacecraft continues to make observations in new patches of sky in its extended mission, searching for planets and studying a variety of interesting astronomical objects, from distant star clusters to objects such as the TRAPPIST-1 system of seven Earth-size planets, closer to home.
Ames manages the Kepler missions for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation operates the flight system with support from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
3. Wednesday, June 21, 2016: Hotel Mars. See Upcoming Show Menu and the website newsletter for details.
4. Thursday, June 22, 2017; 2-3 pm PDT, 5-6 pm EDT, 3-4 pm CDT: We welcome back Gwynne Shotwell of SpaceX. Please be succinct with your calls and emails. One question per listener to allow as many as possible to engage with Ms. Shotwell. Thank you.
5. Friday, June 23, 2017; 9:30-11 am PDT, 12:30-2 pm EDT, 11:30 am – 1 pm CDT: We welcome back Dr. Doug Plata. Doug will report on ISDC and much more.
6. Sunday, June 18, 2017: 12-1:30 pm DST (3-4:30 pm EDT, 2-3:30 pm CDT): OPEN LINES. Call in about the topics you want to talk about. First time callers welcome. Space and STEAM topics welcome.
Estevan Guzman one of the Astronomical Illustrator / Animators at Griffith Observatory joins us to talk about cosmic art created by science and its impact on the industry.
Space news topics covered:
Was the “WOW! Signal” a Comet? Probably not… Darpa selects XS-1 partner & X-37B gets a new launcher China Tests “Spooky Action At A Distance” in Space Asteroid Redirect winds down, Deep Space Gateway gains support Hubble sees waltzing dwarf stars
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